


Second Chances

by TheLightdancer



Series: The Last Battle and Day of Doom: [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childbirth, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to past unwitting incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:22:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27125822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: After talks with the wonderful author of Restoration, I present this alternate universe based on an idea of theirs that wasn't quite followed through in the first work. In this case, one major difference changes. In this alternate universe of an alternate universe, Arwen Undomiel is pregnant when Nienor Niniel finds her in the woods, and from this change, and the parent of the child in question, all else follows.
Series: The Last Battle and Day of Doom: [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1988791
Comments: 28
Kudos: 9





	1. For Want of a Horsehoe Nail:

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Restoration](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21722182) by [Ilya_Boltagon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilya_Boltagon/pseuds/Ilya_Boltagon). 



**_Year 295 of the Third Age of Middle Earth:_ **

Something had gone wrong, Nienor Niniel understood this in the very marrow of her bones. The dead should not have returned when and as they did. Of course that which had escaped, some thirty years prior, should never have escaped either. She did not understand how it had happened, nor what it meant to have herself and her brother returned, and returned of all places here. To a cabin in the shadow-haunted woods where the Kementari had blessed Arda with concealment from the lurking monsters. She had returned to life, finding herself here, with her brother, with whom she'd......

She closed her eyes, clenching them tightly and shook her head. She would not go down that line, she could not. Of themselves her hands started to slide toward her belly, spurred by the remembrance of that change but she clenched them and her nostrils flared and she refused to accept taking that line further. They had awakened here, in the forests, and had built a log cabin, drafty but sturdy. They had awakened into a world much later than the one they knew, though the Enemy, somehow, improbably, had not changed. They had hoped, after their deaths, that Morgoth had gone beyond the Doors and so evidently he had.

Now.....

Of themselves her eyes flickered north. He had returned. Morgoth lived anew and had retaken command of his legions. That much was evident, the old familiar feeling of Evil as a tangible thing that sickened the air. He had returned, and so had they. She knew what Turin's destiny was if Melkor had returned from beyond the Doors, and so did he, yet they both agreed, though they were severed from each other by too many old sorrows too deeply interwoven from old lives and old sins, be they ignorant or not. They had built this cabin and Turin roved and hunted and sought to constrain and to cull any Orcs or other, fouler things that came too close to it. He was often gone, she mused with a sharp grimace to her face.

It was much easier for him to settle his own worries by taking a blade and killing things than for either of them to speak. Nienor swallowed the acid laugh that wanted to spill up as she moved, cautiously, dagger at her side, to get water from a nearby river. She had entertained, once, the fancy that she could be the hero just like her brother. She too was a child of Hurin Thalion, the hero who'd slain monsters until his axe melted with the venom of their blood. Then she'd met a dragon and....

Her knuckles went white around the hilt. No. She was back now, this was a new world, a dangerous place. Morgoth lurked in the north, and in a world where the incarnation of evil itself lived and moved in physical form once more, nothing wise could be incautious.

She stopped brooding and moved with quietness and skill, old knowledge that this new flesh held instinctively, a thing that made her hair stand on end with the eerie implications, and knelt beside the river, filling water-skins with a quietness and a wariness. She knew the notations on maps, the few of them she'd seen when a child in Elven realms. 'Here there be monsters.' For now, there was only the familiar sounds of beasts and birds, and the normal kind of shadows cast by trees, the trees creaking and the wind moving through and around them and with them, an eerie sound yet soothing in that it was normal. 

There was the babbling bro-

She froze and placed the now full canteens down and drew the knife. There was something blundering through the woods, something utterly ignorant of woodcraft. In a world of monsters, it was most probably one of them, and Orcs, in particular, were arrogant. If they saw her the incongruity of a woman with a blade would buy her time to shout her brother's name and-

Her eyes went very wide. The being that blundered in was clad in rags, foul-smelling, and her hair stringy and frizzled. She was.....her eyes widened still further and her mouth gaped in mute horror. This was an Elleth, a pregnant Elleth, with hair that had become marked with a sign of something she had never seen on Elven flesh. Streaks of white that meshed with the black in a pattern that she had never seen before, signs of aging and that terrifyingly strange on one so young. Her eyes moved swiftly and she winced, awed and shocked at the damage done to the woman's right hand, which was a horribly mangled thing that meant she had somehow, improbably, quite literally ripped it out of a manacle heedless of the damage. She knew Elves. They did not do such things save at extreme duress.

Her ankles bled likewise, and the Elleth paused, gasping for breath, bloodied left wrist and hand against a tree, before her eyes turned to meet Nienor's with a sudden dawning horror of shock. The two beings stared at each other across a gulf of sorrows and ages, and then the woman fell to her knees, groaning as there was a sudden wet sound and Nienor's eyes went very wide indeed. She remembered when her mother had-

"TURIN!" she shouted. This was not good, not good at all. A pregnant Elleth, who'd fled the enemy, an enemy who had at best taken her from the arms of a husband and done....

She shook her head again. "TURIN!"

She shouted again. And then he was there, tall and dark-haired and stern, the figure of one who relished combat and was good at it at one level and staring with his head tilted with a complete bemusement at his face.

He swore, foully, and then told her "Get her to the cabin, Nienor. Do what you can. Whatever she escaped from...." He snarled.

"I need to make sure there are no tracks."

She nodded, and as Turin strode off to that task, she found herself handling something she had heard of but never seen.

An Elven stranger in the woods, pregnant, and in labor...in their log cabin.

Despite it all she couldn't hold in the sardonic laughter as she went through half-remembered motions that seemed to flow into her head from something she could not quite parse, as if her hands were not altogether her own. The labor took hours, the Elleth reacting to what was clearly a painful and even bloody, to an extent, birth with less reaction than she'd expected (but of course that would be so, this one ignored a broken hand and bleeding wrists and ankles, so what was labor to such a being except a pain that registered with small short screams).

What made things eerier, in that time when Turin had gone to clear the tracks and returned with a strange look on his face was the strangeness around the birth. It was a clear day but now there was darkness, gathering and the ozone smell of lighting. Not within the forest, nor on top of it, but around it. Peals of thunder that echoed with the terrible majestic booming sound of one of the more wondrous and terrifying things of the world. Fog rose from the river around the forest, the wind pealed with voices, echoing. Voices that brought tears and shame to their eyes. Beleg, Morwen, Hurin, Mim, even....it. For none of them would dare to name the beast that had in the end ruined them.

The earth rumbled and groaned with something almost like a terrible song, though not, curiously, within the cabin itself. The trees seemed to creak and to rumble with voices like they were afraid but too afraid to take on a greater form.

All of this when the birth itself was a strangeness that blended all the normal ugliness and wonder of watching a child of any race being born, with elements that were...odd. At points she seemed to sense a Presence in the room that was broodingly powerful and which sifted through her mind with a conscious will, that Elven gift known as _Osanwe_ but superbly powerful. And the strangeness seemed to react to the birth in a pattern like there was a will behind it but that could not be. The monster in the north could not see them and only he could do things like this. 

They worked, for hours, to help the Elleth give birth, cautiously and studiously avoiding looking or touching beyond where they had to do things, and then, after all, when the birth came there was a still greater strangeness. Normal infants did not look at the people who helped them leave the womb with such focus, and they certainly did not with eyes that gleamed with a yellow light, like that of Arien herself. Nor was there some Presence of _Osanwe_ that could make two full grown humans place the infant by his mother, who hovered in a near-delirious element bleeding from.....parts of herself, with the infant turning the golden eyes and a sudden strange droning element to the air, and watching the flesh _visibly heal itself and seeing some of the surprisingly and horridly great amounts of scarring there repairing itself._ The delirious moaning and the constant 'Nos', 'please', 'don't'' and 'Save me's that echoed from her were replaced by calm, still breathing. 

By that same will they brought the baby up to the breast of the Elleth, where he turned to suckle with again a surprisingly honed and conscious instinct that no natural newborn should have been able to do, and Nienor covered the Elleth with their only other blanket for modesty after quietly removing the other sheets and vowing to have them burned.

What disturbed her was that Turin was staring at the child and those golden eyes, then the mother, then the child, then the mother, then straight at the child's eyes as he turned to look at them with an unnaturally mature and sardonic expression on an infant face, and then his hand went straight to the hilt of his blade.


	2. Decisions, Decisions:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turin decides whether or not to use his blade and reflects on actions taken and untaken.

**_The Cabin in the Woods, 295, Third Age:_ **

The first shock of Nienor calling to him, especially in that tone, had been an overwhelming one. The second in the sight of a pregnant Elleth in labor, still moreso. The third, the strangeness of winds that echoed with the voices of the dead in unhallowed form, lightning and thunder without rain, and the golden eyes that gleamed with a strange eldritch light did nothing to make his emotions easier. The child was born now, the mother under new sheets. The immensity of what had pushed at the material fabric of the universe seemed to settle and now he was thinking like himself again (and he tried to stifle and mostly succeeded bitter laughter that he had ever been one to think to begin with, given how his life had turned out the first time). He had met Melian the Maia in Doriath, a time or two. And beyond that seen her as the regal and intimidating Queen on her throne.

He had never met a truly powerful force of the Enemy other than....It...but he knew the beings of the other spheres when he saw them and that child oozed that presence. In all the known world there was but one being who would dare to violate the prohibitions on the Ainur and those without Ainur heritage intermarrying. A Son of God seeing a daughter of man and taking wife to himself, whomever he chose. This child had no right to exist, it was an unhallowed thing that should never have been born. The mother was innocent, he knew none would willingly take to _him_ as anything like what must have done this. The broken hand that Nienor was healing and that to his further concern was slightly amplified there by a sudden gaze from the abomination in her arms and the wounds on her wrists and ankles that saw the blood flow halt and became thicker scars without anything further from a renewed and sudden pulse of the abomination's powers confirmed that still further.

His hand remained on the hilt of his blade, tight, the knuckles aching with the desire to remove the blade and prevent whatever manner of hell-spawned demon this was from wreaking more havoc. And yet he froze.

Everything in him as a warrior committed to the eradication of any and all presence of Evil ached to destroy something like this, and yet....first, it was an infant. An infant who needed to be washed, soon, and cleansed of the unpleasantness of childbirth all over him but still one. Second, everything he'd seen of the being directly acting on another had shown him a being whose first impulse was not what he would have expected from a son of......it was actions that showed something that cut through the initial reddish haze and killing impulse and led to him thinking more closely. 

He leaned toward Nienor quietly to mention that she and they would need to find a way to clean the child and make sure the mother didn't panic if he was taken from her even briefly, and she nodded.

As he continued to stare, Turin pondered things further. If the child was who and what he had the horrid suspicion he was, then there was something else lurking here. All his life and at the start of this one he and his sister lived under the baleful influence of the curse of the thing that brooded and had built a lesser version of its old fortress to the north, or more precisely had had no doubt tens, even hundreds of thousands of Orcs doing it. If that child was who and what he suspected it was, it would let him (and Nienor, and part of him felt the heat of shame that remembering Nienor had suffered too and needed this change as much as he did was a secondary thing at best) have something he had never imagined possible.

A chance. A true chance to heal, to be freed, to be released from the Curse of the House of Hurin.

That led to him having a wry grin. He would need to see if the mother would be willing to stay when she awakened, and if she (as he suspected might be so after what had clearly happened) would talk to Nienor, as he knew full well when she awoke it would take her time to trust him. Her body, from what he remembered of it, and that awareness meant that he stood for a time in indecision, was surprisingly healthy for one so long a captive of.....of him. And yet it made sense. She had had a child of....so of course it would not be a case of the monster's thralls wanting to risk that.

The woman was probably physically healthier than she had been in a long time, was his guess, but health of the body was not health of the mind, and the way her hair was that mixture of black and white indicated that the body's physical health was at best a guess. Either way, Nienor, he hoped, would offer. His hand moved from the blade before the child's gaze turned to him once again and this time, Turin willed himself to meet that gaze and the immense Presence of that which brushed at the edge of the material universe, even more than the revival of the dead seemed to indicate was already happening. The few times he'd snuck out by day or night, he'd noticed a strange change. The skies were redder and the planet hotter, as if Arien, the Sun, had aged somehow and swollen with age and weakness. The night sky's stars were duller, and he knew that time had somehow and improbably seemed to change and that before he had risen from the grave and found himself in a wood with his sister by his side, both mercifully clad, somehow, and clad in clothes that were clean in spite of awakening on the ground amidst the smell of the Kementari's creations.

This too meant that his hand went from relaxed around the hilt to off of it. There was potential here, his gaze shifted from fear and wrath to calculation, eyes narrow, jaw set. Potential, yes. He could free his family of a curse and what's more.....

His face broke into what was not a smile and no outside observer would have seen it. Redemption, gained from the most improbable source.

\--------

Without a word Turin turned and left the room leaving Nienor very confused and her head whiplashing between the mother and child, Turin's moving out of the room, and the general feeling of Strangeness here. She remained, for a short time, indecisive, not entirely clear on what was going on or why. The mother had come here, and now Turin had whiplashed from helping her through the birth, then that sudden look of pale horror and wrath on his face and clearly gripping the hilt of his sword with killing intent, then it changed and now.....

She bit back a yelp of fear when the door opened and Turin returned with damp cloths and a bowl, telling her softly "We'll get the child clean, too." Mutely, Nienor nodded, and Turin understood at some level why she, of all people, took more care than most to be careful with the child and giving him gentle touches. If he noticed the ways her hands trembled slightly and her breath shook with memories of something......well, his own were trembling just slightly that way and for a moment, a very long moment, Turin's face was briefly one of sorrows too deep to express and a very cautious, fragile hope.

After cleaning the child Turin ensured that the now-bloodied cloths were taken to the rest to be burned in the daytime, lest burning it at night risk whatever protection enabled them to retain safety in the woods. It was nighttime now, the night sky more a thing of violet and pinkish hues than the black he'd taken for granted, but it was still not something he'd risk 'merely' to burn things changed by the oddity that had come upon them in the woods.

The child had been very quiet when they cleaned him and his gaze was far too focused for a natural child, a gaze that saw deeply and with brute force, though he was quite certain that whatever power lurked within the heart of the child could not be controlled or steered by a being born quite literally an hour ago.

In his mother's arms the golden eyes closed and he saw that the mother's restless sleep eased with her child returned to her, shaky breathing become steady.

Turin and Nienor slept elsewhere, in what was the longest and the strangest night that had ever happened to them thus far.


	3. 'Ah mother, whyever did you let me go into the woods with Helen?'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turin finishes cleaning up from the strange events of yesterday and encounters (more hides from) Elves in the woods.
> 
> The Elven woman awakes and Nienor meets her for the second time.

**_The Woods, the next morning:_ **

Turin had made a point of going shirtless, for a change, precisely because it was not a luxury to be taken for granted that they would have cloth at all. He did not have so many shirts that he could afford to mess up the one he wore with bloodied sheets, even ones where the blood was dry (he had somehow, miraculously if that word applied to what he suspected the infant truly was, avoided this the first day but he did not take those 'miracles' for granted). He had taken them to a place removed, where the trees were thinner. And more to the point, where they did not creak and seem to echo with voices of malice that fortunately seemed more directed at Orcs than himself or his family.

It had not taken much to stir up a fire, and there was a further strangeness in a sudden means where the wind picked up, fueling it to a much hotter heat than he'd expected. The wind echoed with the voices of the dead, his father, his mother, old Thingol. Even that prick, Saeros. But it was a wind that meant his fire had become something much hotter than he'd anticipated, a heat that meant when he put the cloths he'd cut up quietly with a dagger to make the task a quicker one into it that it felt pleasantly good against his skin. The wind's voices did not mean, he found out with a sudden set of noises in the woods that he could not hear voices that were true-voices, those attached to bodies, not to the dead to whom so many emotions clustered.

What was worse was that he heard voices of those who would have known him had they seen him.

One of them, aristocratic and retaining the flavor of her Teleri and Vanyar accents filtered through Sindar pronunciation, a crispness that made the voice of Artanis unforgettable, was the being whom he knew by that name and whom was known in this age and in this time as Galadriel.

"I know what I felt, my love."

The deeper voice of pure Sinda accent was that of Celeborn, and that made him still more cautious.

"What you're describing is impossible. I know that your mentor, my former Queen did such a thing but it was the will of Eru. The Great Enemy could, perhaps, physically perform certain actions but him siring a child? Never."

Artanis's voice was harsh. "The worst part was that I felt someone in that rawness who if it were correct...."

Silence followed.

"If it were correct, my love?"

"I would be one of the only ones who would truly understand. I and her family, if family she would trust and I am not certain after what must have been a long time in that monster's clutches she would take it."

More silence followed.

"You're certain of it? Certain you're not letting Elladan and Elrohir and even the enemy show you what you wanted to see? What I wanted to see too, for that matter?"

Again silence though this time Turin was certain if he'd had the ability to see he would have seen Artanis shaking her head.

"No, I know the minds of my family more than anyone else. I know she lives, now. When we return, I will speak to my grandsons privately and.....I will apologize to them."

Her voice became somewhat harsher, sterner, almost a perfect imitation of Melian's own voice the few times he'd seen her chastising her husband even slightly.

"So will you. She lives, Celeborn. After enduring horrors that would have slain many greater than she." 

An audible gulping sound, then Celeborn's voice.

"And if a monster like you describe was born?"

She paused for a moment. "Only the being I fear....." she paused. The unspoken nature of what was in her eyes and in her hesitation left Celeborn puzzled, though he had not stayed married so long to Galadriel by pushing her when she thought silence was wiser, "That I fear did a grievous wrong, and you know of whom I speak..." Celeborn nodded, and his eyes flickered north, as did hers, "was innately evil. I may be blinded by hope, and by shame after so long in denying that her brothers were wiser than I, but I would give the child a chance. In the end, he would still be a child and even the mightiest beings could be slain in sleep."

Silence followed and as the bloody traces of the Elleth's childbirth and what it had done to their sheets went up in smoke, the silence stretched until he was certain the Elves had gone, after which he took a deep breath and found his shirt rolled up and wedged in the bush where he'd placed it, shaking it out and the leaves off of it.

Turin's emotions were still more confused than they were yesterday. Yesterday he would have agreed with Celeborn, at first. Monsters in infancy would never grow to greater horrors. Today? With the hope of something he'd had come to his life that he had never imagined possible? His emotions were confused enough that he decided to take a slight risk and go on a patrol to the outer edges of the forest. Maybe a foolish Orc or some other monster would be sneaking around and he'd have the pleasure of putting aside the confusion with some nice, nifty blade-work.

\----------

_**The Cabin:** _

It had been a long, long time since she had known anything like this. Even after.....

Her body did not know what to make of where she was and as she was there/ It was soft, sheets and a bed. That which had grown within her and been sired by dreadful things now slept against her and she felt.....her eyes remained closed. Her body hurt less than it had in a long time, and it had hurt less since her stomach had begun to curve and _he_ had called her by that name that was not hers and spoken cruel words and left her to go with a being to whom she knew an unimaginable secret. To think that the cycles of legend and myth that crusted around her family worked like this, that it had been....

Her son, and she thought of him then as her son and would always do so, no matter how life and everything else changed, slept by her side peacefully. He was hers, he would never be like that which had....

The hand not holding him, her broken hand that had been somehow set, though she knew instinctively that it would always be thicker than the other and marked with deepset scars, clenched with new feeling and the release from that slight pain meant she calmed herself.

What now? Had.....the strangeness that she had learned....meant that her captor had reverted to what she had been, that she was being tormented with an illusion of safety and consideration that she would regret the more deeply upon awakening? She kept her eyes closed and closed them more tightly when she heard a door open, and footsteps. Yet these were not the armored footsteps of Orcs that moved with a brutish crudity and a simian-like aspect to the gait. This was bare feet, on a wooden floor. wood. Not stone.

That difference meant that she was willing to cautiously open her eyes, and carefully maneuvered her son where he could nurse, if he wished, though the baby remained asleep and did not take the potential decision to do things or not.

Her gaze turned to the left, where she saw a tall blonde woman, who gazed at her with a set of expressions, macro and micro on her face that showed at some level she understood all too well what it was to carry a child that had never been intended to exist, to love and to want to have loved.

Fourteen years from when she'd last heard her own name spoken at all, after fourteen years of a hellish existence that had culminated in this, it was that which broke through the immediate cycle of fear responses at the vision of a daughter of Men seeing her in a bed, vulnerable like this. The partial connection though her powers, enhanced as they were in her son's presence, and the feeling of those emotions was nothing a creation of the Enemy could feel. Even that which had held her captive had proven it, for the kindness of the creatures of Morgoth barely existed, insofar as it could exist at all, and it never came with understanding.

The woman spoke Sindarin, surprisingly good Sindarin.

"Mae Govannon. I've brought you soup, and a small bowl of water." There was cloth by the soup as well, which the woman seemed to look at with surprise (and Arwen would only learn why later).

Arwen let herself smile for a moment. She was not in that place or held by his minions but after everything she'd endured, it was hard to speak and harder to trust, at least at first.

Arwen nodded, and then as their gaze met a silence followed one that even with the understanding of a shared sorrow was marked by the sheer awkwardness of everything, at least at first.

She remembered her name, she realized, her face kept carefully still to keep her sudden shock and slight horror at that incongruity hitting her. She remembered it, after fourteen years of answering to another and paying for the crime of a revered ancestress whose heroism had become her nightmare.

Her gaze cautiously went to her son, who was now awake and nursing. Did she remember her name because of him?

As the woman turned to leave, to give her some privacy, Arwen spoke, with a voice that shook with words that had not been spoken in any tones save horror and pleading and were marked with a tone of disbelief that this could be where that misery had gone after a time short in the long lives of Eldar but an infinity in the place and time she was held in.

"Thank you."

The woman turned and smiled at her, and strode out. That too meant that Arwen was not elsewhere. No longer in that place, exposed to the cruel whims of monsters.

After her son nursed, she found the cloth by the bowl of soup and the water, and as she let herself eat and drink real food and not the horrid things she'd been taunted with eating and the diet that until her.....conception...had been more near a thing of starvation than anything else, she turned to her son and eventually had him wrapped in swaddling, the baby making his first sounds that she'd heard. He was strange, her son, but given who his father was and what he was, he would never be anything else. The way he cooed was that of an infant, not something or someone older, and Arwen, un self conscious about nudity given the horrors she'd endured, simply let herself relax at that point.

Here, at least, she would have a chance to give someone else something she had forgotten. Safety, a life that could be enjoyed for the sake of living. If only she could trust the Men, especially if the woman (and she dimly remembered (fortunately her food and drink were down when her hands started to tremble and her breathing shook with near hyperventilation for a moment) the man realized who his father was. No child deserved to suffer merely for the crime of being born.

Her head whiplashed to the door and she started, slightly, the woman's face turned incandescent at the sight of her body, placing her hand in front of her face for a moment. Arwen found herself relaxing, then, realizing that this was another small sign she was in a safer place. The dress that was left by the door, attached to a small kind of what looked like a bent nail was a cruder material than that most Elven women would wear. Arwen let herself stand up, quietly, and strode over to it, and felt it and made sure that this too, was real. Real clothes, after so long of nothing or the increasingly tattered and ill-fitting rags of what she'd been....brought...to that realm in.

She would have been mortified, once, at tears flowing down her face for so small a thing but while she was deeply and inwardly shamed, feeling herself beyond the pale of anyone who would welcome her into society, in some things where she had been had changed her, and what would have mortified her once left her with no impressions beyond simple gratefulness. It did not take her long to slide into the underclothes beneath the dress (and to cry again at the gratitude of feeling for the first time in a very long time like a person and not a piece of meat or a horrid canvas of flesh for a monster to work their fell designs upon) and she could not resist feeling this, realizing things had changed.

For the first time in fourteen years, something began to flower in her body with an unaccustomed warmth and tenderness. Hope, a thing near forgotten, and she made a quiet prayer of gratitude to the Allfather in his halls beyond space and time, that something as irredeemably tainted and marked with the price of her sins, though she vowed to treat him as a person and her son and let him know what she knew she would never know again, as she could have that.

It was thus that her son, in his swaddling, saw his mother's face work into an expression she had forgotten how to make in those long years, one where muscles ached from so long of not using them, her face lined slightly with the effects of what had happened to and how and in what ways it had happened. He returned the smile, imitating it as babies did and his next sounds were giggles. The wind mirrored those giggles, soft and loving, and both Turin and Nienor froze, for a moment, faces pale, then shook their heads with uncertainty. It was difficult to know what to feel with that, logic indicated fear was still a rational response, but one could never fear a wind echoing with a baby's laugh the way one did a wind that echoed with the voices of the dead.


	4. Voices in the Woods:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elladan and Elrohir on one of their attempts to find their sister encounter a wild man in the woods. 
> 
> They also decipher a shadow in the woods and ponder at its meaning.

**_The Woods:_ **

A month had passed since the previous encounter with Elves. In that time the Elleth had not yet spoken her name to them, and neither he nor Nienor was yet brave enough to ask. She was made of stern stuff, she had had a child of Morgoth Bauglir, one with strong powers over the very material elements of the universe, but she was quiet. There were more days than not where her entire motivation seemed to focus on her son with little attention for anyone else, even herself. And the child himself....he was only a month old but he walked with a confidence far greater than any child of that age should. He was big, too, bigger by far than any true one month old Ellon. And those eyes....

Turin froze for a moment and shuddered.

Eyes should not be that bright or that golden. As the boy had begun to grow and to experience that strange, accelerated growth he had noticed a strangeness. Their crops that had taken greater effort and work were coming in much more fruitful than not, with larger and entirely delicious heads on it. The growth changed, but that was only to be expected. The days were hotter in the day and colder at night, the Sun reddish.

The winds held voices, and before the boy had spoken it had been the voice of a normal child. He shuddered again at the memory of what had driven him to the patrol. The boy had looked squarely at the striped-haired Elleth, and spoken in what was more two or three voices intertwined, each a deep basso that had no business in a child's mouth, the sound driving Nienor away as well.

He had said: **_Nana,_** and even if that defanged some of the strangeness, there was too much else. Low and rumbling voices in the wind, a child of a month who looked more like a child of nearly a year and had the height and weight to match. Somehow, the child was able to take and spin raw material into clothes that suited it, a casual display of those same powers and yet no less eerie, for this was a child of a month with skill superior to the venerable weavers of Eldar culture. Crops grew more, low voices in the wind, and the greater and lesser injuries of the body healed easily, too.

The child's emotions could carry theirs, which meant it was a very good thing that a child of so terrible a sire was a happy and a friendly child. Part of him wondered just how awful it would become if the child was angry, or sad.

No, it was easier to avoid such things and to skulk around in the woods, searching for enemies that seemed to evade this place and give it a wild berth. Even the Wargs, the lowliest and most vicious of the Great Enemy's minions did not come near. He had heard a few probing at the edges of the forest, sometimes, and at those times the child who otherwise at times seemed unnaturally curious and focused seemed to stare into space and then parts of the wood darkened and there were fell voices and sounds and then the Wargs fled yelping like a small dog that had challenged a Warg themselves.

It made things frustrating, but it meant avoiding the thing that looked like a child and was not. It was a steep price to pay to free him from his curse, but he was as well glad to let the woman who'd survived the less than tender attentions of the Dark Lord to raise her own ill-gotten spawn. Part of him felt a sense of sympathy for her, but he buried that amidst a desire to fight, to bury his frustrations in something that he could hit and kill, not something that was a force next to which no mere man could triumph.

Fell voices on the wind, and yet the voice spoke in a kind of basso childish babble that added to a surrealistic aspect, at times normal, and at other times a continual growling droning horror, and it seemed that the voice was within the narrower elements of its own terms one that echoed in happiness. Yet with such things it was impossible to forget a key bit of the stories the Eldar had told, the ones that hinted at the nature of the Great Enemy.

"Once the mightiest in all creation, with a share in the gift of all his brethren."

Just what manner of abomination was it he was hoping would free him from his curse? Dark musings meant that it amplified the effect when he had encountered not one but two figures who had strode into the woods, cautiously.

\----------

For Elladan and Elrohir, both the best and the strangest day in fourteen years had followed a sudden flare of a mind that they had thought lost....and the sudden welling up of a presence of tremendous power and strength, one that was of a nature unknown to them. That evening their grandmother had come to them, with a haunted look on her face, with reddened eyes and tear-streaks like tributaries of a river down her cheeks. She had told them privately that in the end, they were right after all. Their sister lived. They had asked about the other presence and she had fallen silent then, saying nothing.

They knew where the flare had occurred, but they also knew if they had felt it, perhaps the Great Enemy had too. Thus a time of waiting, to see if the mysterious Edain in the woods would flee or not hounded by some monstrous thing of the Hells of the frozen north. When nothing came and a month had lapsed, they went to this venture, seeking for their lost and sundered sibling. They noticed strange things in the woods, that the woods were somewhat darker than the normal shadows and that the shadows were of a different and strangely and horridly familiar kind....and yet there was no menace here, quite. Just something that was and meant nothing more than the assertion of its existence.

What they noticed especially was that here the winds echoed with a low rumbling sound, like the grinding of stone. It was like a voice, but nothing they knew ever spoke that deeply, or with that kind of resonance. A voice, not snarls, or they would have feared some phantasm, some elder creature, old and dark and strong of the Dawn-Age had crept into the woods and waited for them with red eyes and shining fangs.

The wind had changed when they entered the word and they heard the voice nearer them and more intensely, and it made them fearful, slightly. In trying to escape it they nonetheless did not lose sight of the greater goal, and of whom they were searching for and what their hopes were if they found her.

When they encountered an Edan in the woods, dark of hair and brooding, his presence like a thunderclap wrought into Elvish form, they froze. He was a very big and tall man, and stoutly built. Like fabled Turin of yesteryear ,and yet it was improbable. Even if he walked again the Dead surely would not before the judgment, would they?

His eyes were a gaze that held them spellbound, and yet he seemed as startled by him as they by him.

For all that he was startled, his voice was cool and collected: "Mae Govannon."

They bowed slightly, repeating the greeting.

"We are searching for our sister."

He stiffened slightly.

"Why here?"

The question was rude, and slightly defensive, and yet in these shadow-haunted woods with winds that spoke with low and rumbling voices it was hard to press a point.

"She was taken fourteen years ago, when Rivendell fell." 

"Rivendell?"

"Our father's domain. The Great Enemy's forces stormed it, and sacked it. Most of us escaped. Our sister did not. Elladan and Elrohir Elrondion at your service."

They bowed again and Turin bowed once more, saying "Urwaen son of Umarth at yours and your family's."

He shrugged slightly. "The only people here are me and my sisters." Part of him wondered at the casual usage of the term for a woman he'd met a month ago, and yet the secrecy of what united them, suffering at the hands of the Great Enemy, and in that kind of suffering no less, they were kin in that way if not necessarily much else.

The Elves sagged slightly in disappointment.

"Well, if you spot an Elleth, let us...."

Elladan paused. There was a particular shadow in the woods not far from them, a deep dense darkness that called attention to itself. Within the darkness there were two eyes, golden and gleaming with an eldritch power that caused his eyes to widen.

"Do you need aid?"

It was Elrohir who asked that question, pale and his eyes drawn to the glowing-eyed darkness.

The strange man, Urwaen, shook his head strongly and the Eldar raised an eyebrow but chose not to press the issue. Judging by his appearance, he was thriving in these shadowy realms with muttering winds, and that meant he was stern stuff indeed.

The low chill of fear cast its electric nature up their spines and the Eldar bowed again, and moved off, grateful to leave that place.

Had they stayed but a few minutes longer they would have seen their sister whispering quietly the name that she'd given her son after long thought, at the behest of her......the person who gave her and her son a place to stay.

"Hurin?"

The shadows receded somewhat and became normal darkness and a boy of a month of true age raised his arms and smiled:

**_Nana!_ **

She took him in her arms, and the wind echoed with a happier and more content element, like a stuttering jagged thing that stung the ears that listened to it too closely, the baby speaking softly as he played, gently, with a bit of his mother's hair. His mother was sad, all the time. He wanted her happier. He attuned himself to one of those soft voices only he could hear, or so he thought, and his mother stopped for a second. A low, soft sound like the wind or like a thought. Weeping, Nienna weeping for her children.

A deep sad breath and she moved on, the shadows and sorrow lessened slightly but never truly dimming. That they dimmed at all reminded her of what had happened to her. She moved into the shadow-haunted woods and into what had been a drafty log cabin until some unconscious.....thing...her young son had done shielded it from wind, making it far more comfortable and welcome a place to be.

\---------

Arwen arrived in the cabin, hearing....well, she knew by now that they were who they said they were. _He_ had arisen as a hellish revenant from the Doors, why not they from the land where Men went when they took Eru's gift? She heard Turin and Nienor talking in in low but firm tones, the ones they used around her carefully. It did not come easily to trust men, but she knew at some level she could trust Turin. She had every reason to believe that he knew and that he had known who the father of her son was. How could he not? There was nothing else of Ainur nature physically capable of such things and in a position to do it, not now.

The things that gave her pause were not the too-keen gaze of her son, nor the way the winds seemed to echo with his voice, nor the way his eyes shone faintly with a light in the shadowy edges, such that he never truly walked in darkness. It was two names.

"Elladan and Elrohir."

A stab of grief went through her then, and a low whimper of distress. Her brothers lived, at least. And if they saw her....

Her eyes met the golden gleam of the light of her son's. If they met her, they'd kill him, and then her for having him.

They heard the whimpers and it was Nienor who asked her:

"Are you all right?"

She sighed. "I know those two Ellyn."

They looked at her curiously.

"They are my brothers. The sons of Elrond Peredhil. I am...." she took a deep breath, and girded herself to speak aloud a name she had not heard for herself. "I am Arwen Elrondiel, their sister. You asked my name, when I was up to speaking. I....when I was there I was called," and her jaw became firm and her teeth gritted slightly "by another name," she hissed. "But I remember mine, and I am comfortable to admit it. I'm sorry to disturb you."

She started to move to her room only to hear Nienor say 'No no, it's all right. Would...you like to join us?"

Arwen froze, for a moment, indecisive. Her son laughed happily, playing with a bit of inter-tangled white and black hair, and the wind laughed with him and then she took slow, halting steps to sit by Turin and Nienor, letting herself cautiously just listen, at first, saying little and yet feeling something within her that she had forgotten in the fourteen years in the rebuilt Angband flower back into being.


	5. Where Gods and Mortals Meet:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arwen awakens from a familiar nightmare. 
> 
> Turin and Nienor ponder options.

**_The Realm of Lorien:_ **

_She was there, again, in the citadel of stone and iron. There, ringed by Orcs, by the flopping skulking horrors of the netherworld. There where the last of the creatures that were old and dark and strong had returned to their master, even weakened. There, held by chains, nameless save by the name of her ancestress the hero, who had ventured forth to the beast's throne and incited the very things that made him do what he did to her. It was a place shadowy and clammy and redolent with the odor of decay and of the sense of fallen glory and fallen empires. It was a place where the Marring was at its greatest effect and what she'd learned at her father's side led her to fear might be at work in her even then, that he might do worse than hurt her as he did._

_He might order another of the Ainur to inhabit her flesh, to reshape her as the thing he mentioned in his ramblings. It was not said, much, of the physical condition of the former mightiest of all the Ainur at the time of his death and yet she saw him now, and saw glimpses of what he was, and of who he was. His feet were restored to him, somehow, she had seen that. He went barefoot though she knew that some of the larger creatures of Harad, the creatures called Mumakil had been skinned and forges worked to restore new boots of iron and mumak-leather to suit his scale._

_She knew, too, that in spite of his vast size her body had survived and was too young to know that there was a simple and crude reason for that. Even if she were older with more....experience...she still would have been too refined the daughter of Elrond to note this reality or to dwell on it. She was there in the darkness and so was he. She could hear him raving, bellowing about the triumphs he would exact upon the fallen lineages of his foes. About the fall and the sacking of Minas Tirith and the demise of Gondor, about the joyous return of the beast in Moria._

_Then he left the throne and she knew exactly what that meant, could feel the ground shaking beneath his tread as those orange glowing eyes moved closer and a pale and rangy face of a cadaverous being with gums rotted to black, a divine being fallen into sin, the angel imagined by demons moving toward her as inexorably as the knowledge of Mandos, that realm that all Quendi souls, supposedly, were destined to enter unless they faded into nothingness in the Great Lands. Closer they moved and then the giant was over her and she heard the mountain-fall of things that in the dream as then she closed her eyes not to-_

_She awoke, a small scream erupting from her stifled from her hand. Her son, who walked and talked at just a month old was awakened too. He didn't cry, not like other kids did, though the few times he did this too echoed on the winds in a terrifying ululation. His eyes gleamed in the darkness but they were not the only glow, she realized. There were four lights that gleamed, and confused, she saw two of them wink when she squinted and a sudden chill crawled up her spine with an electric tremble as she raised her hand in front of the gleam and it was occluded and she saw a brilliant blue glow reflected._

_She looked at her son, and saw the power within him, something far, far beyond her own modest abilities. She was the mightiest of the Peredhil lineage beside her father in raw power and she knew it. Part of her resented this, wondered if the resemblance to the one whose name had become hers by brute force and the power that came with it was what had drawn....her, and him to her. Yet the glow did not change, nor did her perception of just what she had given birth to. For a moment she saw a glimpse of a world that could never be now, of a son with dark hair and dark eyes and Numenorean features who smiled at her and ran to play with two of his sisters, and the sense of an aching incompleteness that would never come to fulfillment surged through her._

_Then she saw another vision, a version of her the same age staring at a bloodied pool between her legs, stomach still swollen and screaming in grief at the loss of something she had come to love and would never happen, and she closed her eyes trying to ward it and yet it was not there. And another vision beyond that where a figure tall and brooding and menacing with a golden Ring on his finger displayed the severed head of a Man on his banner and came to her there, in Minas Tirith, and spoke to her of dark secrets as a spell fell upon her and her mind screamed._

_The visions eventually faded with the glimpse of a raving madman, the last shattered traces of that which had been the Witch-King and the words he'd screamed in that raving when he'd seen her and the curve of her belly:_

_Ye mark my words, ye'll hear a child o' Elrondiel calling his father on Sentinel Hill!_

Her hand went to her belly in a reflex, even with the child born. She was a daughter of the Peredhils, a lineage blessed by ties to one of the most powerful Maia to have ever lived. Not the most powerful, of them there was the departed and unlamented Mairon-Gorthaur, and there was the one in the stars whose power and majesty had been akin to the Valar, and it was said that it was of her and Mairon among others that the Ainulindalie in the writings of the elders of her kind spoke when they said among the Maiar were spirits in power as great as the Valar.

She had descended as a being of darkness with eyes that shone with the hallowed light of stars and great fires were kindled and the land laid waste and the stars shivered in the wake of she who brought the Star-Kindler's vision to the fullest.

And just after them her own ancestor Melian, and just after her, the one whose name she was called by. A name she dared not speak nor think of more directly, lest she endure more misery or worse, attract him.

That blood flowed in her veins, undiminished, and this was what she'd done with it. Brought into the world a child she loved though she feared none else would be able to. It at least had given her purpose, a hope that though her existence was iredeemable and a blight on the world, her son might not be and through him her family would not be a curse to all who knew them.

Her son's power emanated in the room and she heard a wind echoing with the sound of a woman weeping, and in that weeping there was a small glimpse of a figure clad in grey with the kindliest eyes she had ever seen, and in that wind and in that nature she let herself cry, softly, muting the sounds lest she awaken Turin and Nienor. She awoke on what part of her knew was one of her bad days, where she wanted nothing more than to emulate Nienor as she had been in her first life, and hurl herself from a cliff to atone for the sin of carrying such a misbegotten.....

Golden eyes turned to her and in the sound of weeping the emotion faded, and she missed a small worried smile on the face of her son, an expression far too mature for a child so young, and the soft murmuring of his voice which with its low rumbling element was dissonant with the youth of his body, and yet to her it was something that could make the shadows dim.

\--------

"I don't think she's going to come out of her room, today."

Nienor said this idly, while eating something of the bread that she'd baked with the help of their Elven.....she wasn't sure what Arwen was to them, but she was more than a refugee with a child now. Listening to her in the night, sometimes, hearing her screams....

Turin's face was silent, his brow furrowed and the impression from him was dark and thunderous.

"I agree. She...." he remained silent, and then he turned to Nienor and looked at her with an expression wholly different and Nienor felt the aura of menace and anger in the room dissipate but couldn't quite meet his gaze.

"Nienor, I...." he began, awkwardly, not knowing what to say or how to say it. "I see in her something that I should have seen a long time ago."

Her eyes turned to his.

"Maybe...." he took a deep breath and clenched his fists, uncertain, afraid to say the words. "Maybe in this sense it really was him, and not us, and we shouldn't blame ourselves for yielding to a curse."

There, it was out. He'd taken a plunge.

"What made you say this?" Nienor's voice was wary and her manner guarded, but not hostile.

"I've seen Arwen dealing with having a....child....who..." he remained silent. Neither of them were willing to accept this. "I already hated the Enemy for what he did to our family, to do that to a child? To make her bear responsibilities that were never hers to bear?"

She nodded. "Well, if she can deal with something much worse, I think admitting that maybe we can......try to forgive ourselves and each other and to start trying to just be brother and sister again is something we can start."

The wind echoed with weeping and there was a sense of endless compassion and serenity, enough to outweigh the barriers that people threw up even as the sorrows of the Weeper meant that words thought deep within heart of hearts spilled without intention.

Nienor looked at him, closely, and then nodded. "I'd like that." 

Part of him made a very obvious deep breath of relief, and then an unfamiliar expression crossed his face, even if not to the broadest possible extent. A wary smile. "So would I."

They looked to the room, as Nienor ate a piece of the bread that Turin likewise cut for himself, and the two remained silent. 

"I wonder...." she mused. "The old legends said a share in all the gifts of the Valar was the enemy's....nature. Could that boy have inherited it?"

Turin nodded. "I believe he has, somehow."

Silence fell again, marked only by munching on bread and by little elements of awkwardness.

"If the worst he does is make shadows enough to scare off monsters and make us tell the truth to each other...."

Turin nodded, though his gaze was wary and flickered back to the room.

"Unfortunately....sister'" and that word still felt unnatural to his tongue and yet part of him rejoiced in being able to say it, "the truth can be one of the most dangerous things there is."

She nodded, and the silence fell again. That day, Nienor would work in the garden while Turin roved around the shadow-haunted woods, hearing the low rumbling of Hurin's voice, finding himself for the first time starting to accept this as a comforting thing. Perhaps....he mused, moving through the woods and hearing the trees murmur and rumble. He knew what possibilities lurked at the edge of his mind and yet he remained not quite willing to admit them. He had spent too long absorbed in the shadows of his own guilt and driven by his own pride and his own folly to trust the illusion of hope and the idea of a brighter and a better future.


	6. To Absent Friends:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turin and Nienor decide to test the waters of their new hopes. 
> 
> Arwen lets herself try to reach out to her family.

**_The Cabin, two months later:_ **

Arwen sat at the table, patiently knitting as her son hummed to himself in a little childish attempt to sing. He didn't really sing like many Elven kids would have, by this point. He had tried once and she had seen _something_ pressing at the veil of reality such as it was in the ascendancy of the end of all things and he had screamed in terror and stopped. He was a strange boy, growing far too fast. It did at least give her something to do to keep knitting clothes for him, and for Turin and for Nienor as well. None of them questioned the appearance of raw material on the table, nor how that might be. They had tried a couple of times and yet thoughts became hazy and then they found themselves never fully there.

She knew his powers would only grow with his lifetime and his age, and that left her fearful. She had to take a task that none else could, and thus far her stubborn pride had led her to try this all alone. The other day, Hurin had had a day where a childish temper tantrum, one of the normal-ish patterns for a child his chronological age had led to an eruption of rage in all of them. She had.... _changed,_ part of her heritage from her Ainur lineage shining out and that had led to no small amount of startling from Turin and Nienor. And they had gone from a cautious normal talking to a furious screaming match and actually quite literally drawing blades, their eyes not reflecting the anger and instead horrified. All of them had quietly speculated what happened if Hurin's emotions turned from the more positive ones to the one that had led to her trembling and resisting letting how afraid of him she was show.

He had been like the father, then, and she took a sequence of deep breaths and made herself very cautiously confront her fears. And then, eventually, it had subsided and the look of grief and guilt on his face had brought a new wave of emotions, Arwen clawing at herself slightly to feel the cathartic thrill of pain of her own devising, none other, and to break the terrible cycle of her anxiety. Turin and Nienor had both become haunted and brooding and moved apart from each other at other ends of the room, Turin's hands in his face and Nienor's on her belly, her face the ashen grey of a corpse.

Hurin had run, then, moving in a sudden blur of motion as the winds at his command opened the door and let himself cry in that ululating element with emotions far too mature for a boy his age, and when his crying stopped the hazing emotions did as well. Each of them looked to the other, Arwen staring at the tears she'd made in her dress and looking in a blend of fascination and horror at the slight amounts of blood on her nails, Turin and Nienor looking to each other with quiet emotions that ended in the first hug she'd seen from them, words that her Elven hearing could have understood if she let herself focus but for a change she went to her room to give them privacy.

She used water from a pitcher to clean off her hand, sighing at one level. Her son was perhaps the mightiest being in Arda, and she had a burden to teach him, to try to make right what went wrong. Could she do this?

The window shutters on her room flew open and then a blur moved toward her with glowing yellow eyes and her son held her and simply just held her, like a normal child wanting comfort from his mother, something she was only too willing to give. He seemed two, now, her child, in physical terms, though he was but four months. She murmured soft benedictions and absolutions and then she heard a knock on her door.

"Come in," she said with a slight degree of trembling in her voice that made the words waver slightly.

Turin strode in, and her eyes flickered to him to see with some surprise that he was unarmed, one of the first times he'd ever been so in her presence.

"You have a hard burden," he said with a voice of soft steel and she nodded, resting her chin lightly on her son's head.

"I...." he paused, and then Nienor was behind him. "No, we, we have been churlish with this. You have survived terrible things, things..." he paused. Silence stretched out as she spoke soft murmurs in Osanwe to her son, who held her the more tightly and let himself cry, tears starting to flow down their cheeks as well, though they just accepted this as the price of having this......unusual reality before them."That no-one, of any age, should have. To be a single mother is a burden greater than most, and it is neither just nor right to you to ask you to bear it alone." 

She looked to them confused. "I don't think he can control what he does," Turin said with that same soft steel in his voice. "I do not have power myself, but what I can do to help, I will."

"We." Nienor spoke, her voice somewhat louder but only somewhat. "We will. We've been thinking the last....few days...that if he is who he is and he stays that way that we have not given ourselves a fair chance with where we were and where we are."

And her eyes met Arwen's as she said in a somewhat louder voice with steel to match her brother's. "And it's long past time that someone gave you this as well. We will not push past where you do not want us to go, but you give us hope," and then the steel became much softer and her face pulled itself into a smile even as the tears flowed all the same "and we would like to help you as we can him. You're not alone anymore, Arwen. And you should never have been here."

Arwen's tears became genuine, motivated by emotions familiar and long forgotten in the wake of those fourteen years and her son's tears stopped, as did those of Turin and Nienor, as her son looked at her in wonder.

Her soft voice responded with trembles and her lower jaw wibbling slightly. "I don't know what you see in me, given the sins I've committed, and what I've done, but....thank you. I will do my best to show myself worthy of this."

\---------

That afternoon, as Arwen let herself sleep for a nap that would, due to her son cautiously exploring what he could do with those _other_ traits, the shaping and permutation of dreams and dreaming, be her first true sleep in fourteen years that had no nightmares stalking Lorien's land, Nienor worked up the courage to ask her brother a question she had wanted to ask in her first life, and had never had the chance. 

"I never did hear of your adventures.....brother," she said softly, her eyes flickering and her body taught with the nervousness of daring to ask. "After our words to Arwen, maybe you could....tell me."

Turin looked at her for a long time, then went to one of their cabinets where they kept some hard liquor that Nienor had made, a trait she'd mentioned once she'd picked up in her previous life. He took glasses, too, and poured full draughts of it, and the two looked at each other.

Girding up himself to deal with the past by a deep drink of the liquor, Turin let himself speak, telling Nienor the full tale, up to the point where he'd encountered 'Niniel' in the woods. Some things were still too raw to pick at, even fortified by potato liquor. Nienor listened, attentively, her eyes sorrowful in turn, and she'd asked him questions about their father, learning much of the man they'd deliberately chosen to name Morgoth's son after. She was fascinated to learn of him, and then after that, a time that had taken a few hours with Arwen briefly opening her door and hearing the discussion and just as quietly slipping out to meet a specific need and making herself inobtrusive, she told her own tale and he listened just as attentively to what she said of his mother and of their own lives and their own adventures.

It halted before the ruins of Nargothrond where a great and terrible Wyrm had squatted in the rubble of a fallen civilization and spoken with a low voice that had been seductive and perhaps his greatest weapon of them all. She too was unwilling to tread there as yet, and yet.....

She finished off her drink, knowing that they would probably be slumping off to sleep on the table and dreading the hangover in the morning, slurring slightly.

"Maybe they'd be proud of us now. Fuck knows they haven't had much reason to be before."

Turin snorted. "She would be, even if he was he would never have said it. I'm....glad we're here, in the end."

And with that the pull of everything, of the emotionally draining few days and the exhaustion of cycling through emotions on the whim of so powerful and unguided a mind as lived there drew them into a sleep as restful as that of Arwen's, a soft glowing golden light that meant for the first time in a long, long time, they let themselves dream of the time when they were children who had parents who loved them, even amidst the terrible Doom given by the petulant Morgoth Bauglir, and on their faces were smiles of radiant warmth and the memory of absent friends and family that filled them with reminders that even in the olden days, not all had been miserable, nor had it ever truly been.

A soft word echoed from Turin's lips as he slept, "Finduilas," and the smile on his face became a bit sadder for a moment but he remembered more the radiance of her hair, and the lightness of the feeling of her lips upon his knuckles....

\--------

That night before going to sleep, Arwen had stared at the ceiling and then made a decision. She was not ready for it yet, and would not be for a time, but she would gird herself to find the courage to actually try to see if any of her family still lived. The worst nightmares she had were the visions of Morgoth himself roaring in triumph as he dashed her family against the stones. Elladan and Elrohir had been prominent in those visions yet if what Turin spoke was true and what he had seen was real, they lived. Even if they hated her for the monster she had become, wretched and ruined, someone who could love the son of Morgoth and treat him as a person, if one with dangerous powers, could not and should not hide from at least her only two living family.

All the same she wept tears for the memory of her father and mother, slain on the claws of Thuringwethil, the vampire's laughter echoing and the memory reinforced in her mind. Maybe if they met together, they could mourn together....


	7. Monsters in the Woods:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After his mother has one of her worst nightmares, Hurin sinks into a terrible rage and discovers a deep secret about the nature of his father. 
> 
> In Angband, a Dark Lord on a Dark Throne briefly notices....something...in the south, in Mirkwood where the shadows lie.

_**The Cabin in the woods, the night after:** _

Arwen's sleep was troubled again, and it was this nightmare, the worst of them all.

Morgoth towered over her, a colossal figure nearly three times the height of an Elf and yet cadaverously thin, his gums blackened and his teeth rotting.

He pointed to the broken bodies of her family, each of them beheaded, their silent screaming mouths yelling at her in anger and judgment. She alone had lived because she had run before the demon with the bat wings had caught her, and then brought her here. Of all the things behind the sudden and unexpected revival of Evil, which had been thought in truth altogether banished with the fall of the second Dark Lord at the Dagorlad and the destruction of his Ring in Mount Doom, it was this. The truest bane of Elves and Men, and even the Dwarves.

Cadaverous with rotted teeth and blackened gums and eyes that burned with a horrid orange fire, clad in armor that glowed with an eerie bright green light, a clawed finger on his right gauntlet pointed and her eyes turned to them.

_**They died because of you, Luthien. You lied to them, you proclaimed yourself willing to abandon immortality for a mortal. And yet the son of Barahir is not here, and here you are. Alone. Your family died because of you, these wretched insipid abominations, filthy half-breeds that take into their veins accursed blood never meant to be shared with lesser life. We are kindred, little bird, and we will always be.** _

She memorized their faces, knowing it was the last time she would see them. Maglor, his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed. Her father with his mouth stitched shut with his own entrails. Her mother's face, flayed and marked with blasphemous and obscene runes in the fell writing of Angband. Her brothers on a two-forked pike, shaven bald, their long hair stuffed in their mouths. The last she knew of them before the gigantic wasted ruin that had once been the mightiest and splendid being in the eyes of Illuvatar strode toward here. 

**_Yes..._**.he grinned _ **. Here, now. You enchanted me once, Luthien. Let the sight of their tortured spirits bonded into those heads see this, before I release them to my brother's....care. Let them see what a filthy harlot hid in their family and enchanted them to think you were younger.** _

And then he began to stride closer to her and his hand reached for her and she knew what happened then. The dream shifted, the image become red as it was then, and she awoke with a trembling set of wretched sobs. Her sobs were as much in the memory of her dead family and amplified, not lessened, by the things Turin had told her, things she dared not hope to be true.

If her family truly did live, she would still be as alone, for they would see him, and they would see her and then she would die, slain as a witch who had lain and had congress with the Devil that had come down from the stars and waged the terrible War of the Jewels.

Her son awoke, though she did not fully grasp it, and he felt her dream and though she did not see it there was a look of wrath on his face that would have terrified her. She never knew that at that moment on a child's face there was a look of anger and wrath and malice to truly be the image of his father, the child springing up and out through the windows, snarling in a feral sense. What he had seen he did not understand, save that the orange-eyed one was his true father.

The thing that the voices in the wind and in his heart told him he could not emulate, that if he let himself yield to the more malevolent impulses that he had learned, at a young age, too young, and so young, to rein in with a grip of iron, he could become that monster. The way he moved in a skittering fashion more like that of an insect than an Elf-ling would have further confirmed it had he seen it. His eyes shone with a light that tilted slightly, ever so slightly, to orange. For a moment, just a moment, the wards veiling the forest wavered and an Uruk, Lurtz, a massive and hulking creature with eyes that were dark as night and a great cleaver in his hands grasped that a forest had sprung into existence that had not been there before.

Taking advantage of the opportunity he slipped in.

This place was strange, it was not Angband. Yet the power here was kindred to that of his master yet retaining some horrid debased kinship to the things of the so-called Blessed Lands. The winds rippled with snarls that were not the noises of his master and creator in his fury but a terrible thing, the noise of a wild beast seeking prey. There was power here all the same, a great power, uncontrollable and willful and the shadows became thicker and noises intensified. The snarls echoed and echoed and echoed and echoed and he slammed his cleaver against his breastplate.

Turin would have heard him the moment he had stepped in, let alone before that but the dark dreams that crept upon him in the wrath of the child who ached to go to the north, to confront the withered beast that dared call itself father and to slay him where he slept on his dark throne, wearied by his weakness kept him in a grip beyond anything he had imagined. Even the decaying Morgoth that cursed his father had retained a great power through his marring to affect and to afflict individuals and great things with tangible force. A dim shadow of the giant that had descended from the stars moved in those woods, and it was that shadow and the feral snarling child that saw the hulking Uruk, a being of seven feet in height and stout in strength, clad in mail of iron with his fangs protruding out in a guttural snarl of his own turned toward him.

The child reared on his back legs, and dark clouds seemed to form within the woods, an ozone smell beneath the trees that led Lurtz to freeze, indecisive.

He had just time to perceive that the child was very large for a boy and that the eyes were horribly familiar when a sudden flash of light and a thunderless lightning bolt struck him and obliterated him, leaving his body ash and his soul to shriek where the souls of Orcs that departed went.

The angered haze faded and the child found himself in the woods and he heard in his heart and in the winds the voices that told him to look and to see their warnings, and why he could not be as other children were. In the woods there was burned metal and a pile of ash, two sharp bleached fangs. The child clasped his hands to his face and fell to his knees, vomiting and then released an agonized scream that pealed in a terrifying ululation that seemed to ripple outward in winds, heard even in the havens. Some said that it was a great cry of Morgoth but the wiser knew that it was something else.

The dark dreams faded and in a very small and not entirely intentional thing that he would later come to regret and speak of as the first conscious time he had done it and one of only two, the dark dreams were forgotten for softer, soothing ones. He leaped, then, the immense strength in his limbs, a gift of Tulkas and of Aule, propelling him to the window he had opened, where he squatted for a moment with his eyes all as the seeming of a demon's that was dreaming, the moonlight throwing his shadow on the floor. He closed the window quietly and slept curled up on the floor, not thinking he deserved to sleep at his mother's side.

\--------

Arwen awoke the next morning feeling a strange emptiness. Her son would be too big, soon, in the end of his first year, if not his second, to sleep by her but that and the ways he grew meant that she treasured such small things of normalcy more. The sunlight, with its intensified heat and its curious reddish hue gleamed beneath the window and she turned to see her son, crying silently, new tear streaks added to older ones. She stared at first bemused and then afraid, and walked over to him and picked him up and held him to her. He slowly awoke, his eyes darker but still golden.

**_Mama, I did a bad thing._ **

She cocked her head. "What do you mean?" And she hated that her voice trembled but the worry there and the fear of the father meant she was caught between fires and had to stay between them for her son needed it. 

_**I saw your dream and I saw him and he made me angry. I wanted to hurt him, to hurt the world. And there was a monster in the woods last night, an ugly big thing with fangs and I killed it. I did a bad thing, mama.** _

"A monster?"

**_Uh huh, all big and I could see it at night but I dun think Turin or Nienor could. Big fangs, he growled at me and I killed him._ **

"A Yrch?" Her voice yelped slightly with a slight crack in it. "You killed one?" 

**_Uh huh. I killed something. I'm as bad as him._ **

Part of Arwen still secretly feared her son could have become a new mirror or a new image of his accursed father. and part of her wondered about the accursed misery that the Yrch faced. It was easy to see in them the monsters that hurt other women as she had been hurt (and men, too, Orcs were not picky about such things and she knew at one level more than most that it was not truly a thing of desire, but power). It was much harder to remember that once they had been the Avari, the Dark-Elves, taken by Gorthaur of what was once Mordor and with the foul arts of his master warped and twisted. Few would have felt guilt or shame. It was the nature of the Orc to be a thing of war and to glory in it, so they were not truly things one could have as neighbors, yet in the end, they too were life, and stuck in a horrid dilemma that offered long lives of misery ending in violence.

So often did things like this happen, so often did people take for granted that the foes of the enemy were merely monsters, not the worst suffering of all, for theirs was something without redemption and where the narrow and cruel triumphs of evil won its short-lived and brassy victorious against the greater slow sorrow of the greater music. In her son's tears, the part of Arwen that feared him at last let go of the fear, for someone who saw the person in the monster could never be what his father was. Somehow, in spite of the great evils she had done that led him to kill her family and to everything she had endured, enough of her father's goodness survived that her son had something in him.

She just held him, for a moment, letting him cry, and then pulled him back a little, telling him a few stories, half-remembered and leavened with information from the horse's mouth. Filtered, of course, for a child but filtered only so much for this child had at times a child's impulses and at times she wondered if he were to truly seek the kind of devastation his father did, just how much that could lead to were he as another. She told him the stories, and finished, proud at some level that a set of stories told haltingly, with stammers and points where she stared into space and twitched as the memories clawed at her until a golden light shone and a kind of peace told.

She held his little hands in hers, one as her hands had been, the other thickened and scarred.

"You feel sorrow for those for whom so little sorrow is felt. Many would feel it for Men and for others the Enemy took and twisted into his service. You reminded me of what was forgotten, though your grandfather told me, back when he was.....among the living. It is easy to hate those like us, but not to mourn for those unlike us.

Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise," and her eyes shone not with blue light but with a sudden brilliant hue like a white corona and he stared in amazement at the thought that his mother was like him, at least somewhat, "you are not your father. You are your own person. You can do things, yes, but they are things you can do. They are not who you are. Thinking that was how he became what he....is."

Other children would not have understood this, but the core of Hurin, that entity that had greater power and wisdom than his small body could reliably support did hear and he leaned forward to hug her tightly as he heard mind-speech and promises that she would do all in her power to help him, and would re-learn herself how to do what she could do.

That afternoon Turin returned from his patrol with a slightly shaken appearance and his eyes met Arwen's, who nodded, and then he looked closely at the sad expression on Hurin's face. The atmosphere in the log cabin was sorrowful in turn, almost weighed down like mountains with that sorrow. Part of him wondered, in retrospect, that it had been such an easy thing to kill or be killed, and not to remember why the killing even existed. The shadow of the Enemy was not just on him, nor on the Edain nor all Men, but on all life. The things that were warped and tortured into his service were no less people for that, people to whom the true nature should at least strive to be (though in the heat of battle it could seldom be and hesitation would be fatal, then) something of mercy. Existence in Morgoth's gaze was a torment, that he understood.

And in that, a slow kindling began of determination that would see Turin ready, toward the end of his journey, for a confrontation. Wisdom dawned then, but it was not yet time in the purpose of the great, for knowledge of why to strike is nothing without the weapons with which to, and as yet they were not near him, or his newfound family. Turin quietly called Nienor to him and told her of the things he had learned, speaking softly lest louder words stir more of Hurin's emotional miasma to greater effect, and she looked at him with wonder, mouthing:

"Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?"

He rolled his eyes and lightly tapped her shoulder and there was a moment of relaxation between them, trusting in the new, fragile hopes. Their gaze turned at last, and they looked at the mother and the child not as unwelcome interloper and an abomination in vaguely mortal form that could one day turn and rend them all before skulking to the north and the service of the greater one that had sired it but people whom for the first time they began to think of, and increasingly to see as much as the late Hurin Thalion and Morwen Eledhwen had been, as family.


	8. Hopes and Fears:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five years later, Hurin has grown to the size of a fifteen year old Ellon, and his powers have grown with his size, but so has his control. 
> 
> Turin, Nienor, Arwen, and Hurin have found a new family life, one that is far stabler than they had ever had any expectation it might be. 
> 
> After years of mulling it, Arwen at last decides to test Turin's words, and to make a fateful decision that will alter their lives forever.

_**The Cabin in the Woods, Five Years Later:** _

Hurin hummed to himself as he moved around their crops. It was one of the strangest bits of dissonance where he was concerned that he took great pleasure in bringing forth crops, and in doing little things to help. If Nienor or Arwen stuck themselves with needles his hand would move and there would be a soft glow that emanated and then the wound would heal as if it had never been. The winds no longer rippled with his voice, though the darkness in the woods had shifted, if subtly. Hurin himself had grown in those years to become as tall as Turin and bulkier, elements of his true heritage and his paternity in the shagginess of his hair, in the deep infrasound-resonances of his voice, which seemed at time to be two or three voices.The winds no longer rippled automatically with his thoughts, and he had learned to make the darkness a more subtle defense, a soothing and welcoming thing to those who meant no harm, and a menacing thing to those who did. 

To the servants of Morgoth the blankness in Mirkwood was now the Shadowland, where they encountered a darkness that reminded them perilously of a nest of Ungoliant-spawn and none dared contest or content with such a thing.

His powers had grown, and it bothered him at times as he hummed and saw the crops responding to his music, the bass resonances casting small vibrations near his mouth and yet not disturbing them that his mother never did manage to give herself enough credit. She had taught him, and still taught him, and had regained elements of her own powers strengthened by what he had done to the wards around the woods. He had not told them that their safety was less in the valor of Turin's arms or even his actions and more in the carefully laid deliberate decisions of another. Another Ainu, this one seemingly bound in mortal flesh yet able to exercise great power. Some illusions were worth keeping, he mused. Yet his mother, who had taught him, who had shown him the ways to blend things of speech and to find means to reach that still calm place, that center where that which anchored him and the gifts that were his to claim remained haunted by her nightmares, by what the creature that had sired him had done to her. 

He hated his father at one level for a lot of things. For what he had done to the people he had come to consider his father and his second mother. As a child he had seen things with a wisdom far beyond his years and seen the full and unvarnished versions (his hand twitched slightly and a small pallor of guilt haunted him at the memories of how his parents had danced on strings he had set for them when his emotions blazed unhindered when he had tried to 'help' and not quite made it). And most of all, for what he had done to his mother. He knew, though she did not, that there were other beings like them. Two of great power and great strength in the north, twins. A haunted man who grieved for a daughter he thought dead or worse, and his twin brother, returned and blazing with more hope though not that much more.

There was also the twins, her twin brothers, and a younger sister. Two uncles and an aunt. He could sense them, their worries and their hopes. He had seen his uncles, even, and he knew their names though he did not quite know who was whom yet.

And the monster in the north had made her think them all dead, left her fearful and dependent a bit over-much on his other parents, using their existence and his as a shield to avoid facing her own demons and seeing who she was beneath them. The strongest, most amazing person he had ever known, suffering from an overlaid nature of fear and trembling and weakness that left her feeling like it had been her who committed the sins, not the person who had.....

He clenched his fists slightly and followed the things she had told him in that wordless Osanwe, reflecting on that image which calmed him down most. The image of her, as she had been before Rivendell fell in the opening strike of the new war, a young girl with a glowing gemstone around her neck, a thing of the possession of Melian and of his own great-grandmother, whom he expected would share the reactions he knew more often than not would be aimed at him. As long as it was him, it didn't matter. He had all those gifts, if they meant true harm he could show them their folly, and that would be that. His mother was much more fragile and blows like that could render the damage done....

He clenched his fists again and focused on that image, of her smiling and singing a soft song, of all things the Lay of Leithian, a song that she had forgotten and came to despise. There were things there, terrible things, that only the harsher pattern of fate could show how to undo. That image, the image of her dancing and singing as the Evenstar of her people calmed him and he resumed kneeling by the plants.

His mother had taught him to see his gifts as that, gifts. Freely bestowed by the Allfather, and freely returned to the peoples of the Great Lands. It was hard, sometimes, to resist the blasphemous thought that between two parents with sons who commanded such gifts that Arwen Undomiel had outdone the Allfather, but he knew better at another level. The soft still small voice he called Eru had told him thus. He called Morgoth his father, though Hurin would never do so save once and that in a context none would foresee, but he had said that Morgoth's atrocities too had their purpose and their nature in his designs. He had told him of one of the great examples, of how his father's warring extremes had made the snow and the frost that linked together the realms of the Wind-Lord and the Sea-King, and that had made him pensive.

He heard all of their voices, Uncle Ulmo's the deepest and the most echoing, and it took great effort not to burst into giggles at Uncle Tulkas's rugged sense of humor, especially when only his mother heard those voices. Yet it was Eru's that was softest and heard as much as thought as voice, and soothing. He knew, though only his mother truly suspected how much it was so and how much he knew, that Eru loved him and had a purpose for him that was not to retread the same path. If only his mother could see that her life meant so much more than having him.

She had had a true chance and not someone doomed to fall and to become the exemplar of the Fallen, to showcase something wondrous and she had overcome horrors and found a way to do it.

Next to that, the mentoring of his other parents, Ada Turin and Nana Nienor, was not so much of a much. Turin taught him the discipline of steel, of the wielding of swords and the nature of warfare, but there a son of Morgoth needed little tutoring. More importantly he showed him lessons that he wasn't quite sure how to phrase yet, but he had a feeling from the gifts of Uncle Namo and Aunt Vaire that there would be more than time for that.

Nana Nienor in her own part seemed to have an issue with him as complex as that of Ada Turin, and it was one that had much less ready means of resolution. The part of him that was so much older was aware that he was a replacement for a child who like him should never have been but never had the chance to be, and it was not something he could resolve.

That lesson was the hardest of all to accept, and it was not one that Eru or the Valar had taught him. For all his power, for all that he could do things with the gifts and spheres of each Vala, he had limits. Nana Nienor's haunted elements of her past, of what Glaurung's curse had done to her, was not something that his gifts could excise or exorcise. And the sad tired spot in his mother, the haunted guilt that her existence was a blight on the world and the resignation that if she did seek contact with her family and they were real that they would kill her and try to kill him, he could not change that either.

The thing that sired him would have tried to find ways and in doing so rebelled against Illuvatar and fallen that way if it had not been another. He, with a wisdom still further beyond his years, accepted that not liking a thing did not mean he could stop it. Again he focused on the image of the Arwen-who-was singing the song before Maglor, Elrond, Celebrian, and her younger brothers and all the people in a room whom he could have identified if he wished but they did not matter. The image of what had been lost and nearly wrecked did, because it was his hope that one day that mother of his would return, too, the horrors she underwent not so much a fixed point in time and an unalterable thing but something she would know had a specific place in the designs of Illuvatar.....and were never her fault, and that she had nothing to apologize for, to herself or to anyone else for the deeds of others.

He looked at the crops and relaxed more, seeing the potatoes growing to full strength and vigor beneath the soil and hearing the winds within the heads of grain.

\---------

Arwen hummed herself as she knit in the room, thinking back on a conversation she'd had, and elements of their lives. There had been a second time Elladan and Elrohir had returned to these woods, though she had made a point to evade them. They would not love her, if they saw her. They would see the person who had had the son of Morgoth Bauglir, and brought him into this world. If they were real, that is, and not some phantom of Morgoth's hiding and relying on the power of Hurin to strengthen it. It was the thing that haunted her about those sightings and led to no small amount of arguments between herself and the mortals she had come to love, and who had come to love her.

They were all removed, now, from the time she had stumbled into Nienor wearing rags that exposed much and hid little, her belly swollen with her unborn son.

Turin and Nienor still danced around that which haunted them most, but they had reached a kind of relationship she wondered if, when her family had lived in the time before the sacking of Rivendell their family had been like that. Had her brothers loved her? Did her parents? She had the kind of body that tempted the Dark Lord into what he had done to her, her power had drawn him too. The resemblance of herself to the one whose name had been given to her haunted her likewise, as a woman whom many would have loved she hated, precisely for what had happened. She had born Morgoth a bastard, would...would _she_ have done so if he had fulfilled his designs?

Part of her knew that her son, with his strange wisdom that lurked behind that oversized frame was right. Morgoth lied, and lied about many things. Her son shared the same belief that her new family did that her old one still lived, but at his core he was an idealist who was good at heart and saw the best in a world of rotting things and horrors. He was the culmination of fourteen years of horrors, but he had not seen the times when his father had tormented her with her family seeming to live and to welcome her as she fled, only for her to find herself hugging a rotting decapitated corpse and then tormented for escaping in the illusion in terrible fashions that left some physical scars (surprisingly few of them, her son had healed her body overtly in a way she did not think herself worthy of, in all truth) but rather more of the invisible and no less real kind.

She did not see how he could have lied about the death of her family, when she had seen it, and when he had.....had....

Her face paled and she clenched her eyes and twitched, her hands moving to her head as she rocked. These were always the worst bits, the memory-spasms that interrupted her brooding and left her feeling like she was there in a place and beneath a thing she had never wanted to be. She had helped defile the memory of the realm her father had so lovingly built and those memories were not worth her. Save one.

She had let herself indulge a small thing of her heritage, a thing that made her slightly different to the other Peredhil, most of whom could merely become birds. She let herself slip into the form of a small fox, sneaking up on her brothers with the patient stalking skill of such beasts of the Kementari. They were busier chirping and laughing at pulling a prank on Figwit, and then she had pounced and yipped and they had made a set of loud chirping sounds and flapped around. A single clear memory, all that was left to her of the life she had lived, once.

Five years of becoming part of a new family that worked, even if some things remained behind fortifications stronger than Angband, and that left her feeling accepted and loved. Five years of wondering over two sightings of the living dead, of letting herself secretly hope, even pray that a God whose ears she was no longer worthy of speaking to would let the answer be a good one. Five years of wondering, of wondering if just letting herself wonder was the psychological version of what she did when Hurin was with his flowers and the crops and Turin and Nienor were too far away to detect things.

She looked to the blade that had small dried elements of blood on it and at her arm. Not now. Not like this.

She closed her eyes, steeling herself.

Five years were five years too long, for the reddish heat of Arien burned more brightly now and the nights were colder, and there were strange things in the skies if one looked too long at them. It almost seemed like with the return of him from the Doors that the very nature of Ea itself was beginning to break down, and she wondered for a moment if that Sight that was her family's gift and curse alike was letting her glimpse a truth most could have dealt with but not understood the nature thereof? She shrugged. If so, that made it more important, not less, to spend the last years of the universe knowing the truth rather than lying to herself and letting her emotional wounds fester for the sake of pain.

Her son was right, all she had to lose with finding out was just a thing of invisibly hurting herself. It ached, sometimes, in another tired spot that couldn't be got at to think her only good contribution to the world was raising Morgoth's own son to reflect a goodness that was in the rest of her family but not in her.

Helping him had reawakened most of her own gifts, and reawakened them to their fullest potential, hidden behind what Hurin called 'the Veil on the woods.'

The Veil meant that she could take this risk, and that perhaps it would not be too much of one.

She closed her eyes and willed herself to think, to let that part of her that marked her.... (her fists clenched. She was not her, she would never be her. She was her own woman, a lesser and ruined version cursed by what her body was and had become, but her own all the same) to reach out, to seek the two who were most-

For a moment her eyes glimpsed something-no, some _one_ else in the north. She paused, for a second. A sister? No, impossible. There was nothing else except maybe her brothers.

Her presence reached out and she spoke in that thought-speech two words:

_Elladan, Elrohir._

\---------

**_The House of Last Resort, Mirkwood:_ **

The twins knew things that others didn't, save their Grandmother. 

Long ago, she had come to them to apologize for not taking them seriously, and their grandfather had done the same when he realized his wife was serious and as not only a wise husband but one who deserved his status among the wise. Their sister lived, lived in the woods that had briefly been a shadowy place of Hell and now the shadows seemed to welcome and beckon and protect them. Winds had echoed with eldritch voices then, the voices of the dead (they had heard Figwit and Hildor and others whom they had known and they had loved). Now it was just wind, seemingly, if a wind that seemed to treat them as family and had a will that no true wind of anything save the Elder King himself would.

It had taken them time to ask their grandmother about the _other_ presence and what they had seen and felt, and Galadriel had reminded them in turn of the secret truth known of the accursed desires of the Jewelmaker and of the fate of Aredhel, and had then said nothing. They had pondered on it and then a sudden horror came upon them and a mixture of grief. Elven women could not live, or so it was said, after they had endured such a thing and yet.....

They pondered further. In the past there had been raids but since the Veil, as some had taken to calling it, on a specific portion of Mirkwood had fallen there had come a time of lull. No armies of Morgoth nor his servants would challenge the Veil, it seemed almost anathema to them.

A blessed lull that gave people time to heal, and to know stability, to know what else could be known of changes great and small alike.

Their sister lived, a thing known only to a few, but she had not said much. Or perhaps, she had lived, and the hell-spawn sired on her by the means of Eol the Avari was all that was left. If that were so....they would hope for the impossible, that a son of Evil could be other than Evil, for he would be all that was left of Arwen. If she lived, why had she not contacted them?

Then, that evening, as they prepared for a new venture to those woods, two circumstances struck within the same timeframe. In the first, a link that had never truly gone away but had remained dormant flared into a sudden powerful existence. They heard a voice in Osanwe they had thought lost, silenced, ended with Rivendell at one level or worse, preserved only to die and at least deserving that her family should know where her grave lay so that they could honor her before meeting in Arda Unmarred.

_Elladan? Elrohir?_

_Arwen?_ Their response was a startled one, and then they felt a mixture of emotions that left them looking at each other bemused. Fear-love-shock-amazement-sorrow-joy-love. 

Emotion pulsed then a second time, love-hope-joy-sorrow-guilt-fear-love. And in that pulse they knew, then, that their sister did live, and that whatever strangeness their grandmother alluded to meant that she had survived something that gave them pause.

There was only one thing of Ainu nature physically capable of doing such a deed, and the horror of what must have happened to her sank into them, as Arwen felt that and closed the link suddenly, and they briefly just stared at the ground, letting tears fall down their cheeks, tears and a low sense of sick shock and amazement that their sister had the strength to survive something that would have slain most Elves.

A clamor followed in the camp, and at first they thought it was the aftermath of Arwen's contact but the way it was there and the startled noises that followed meant that it wasn't. Letting themselves anchor themselves back, they staggered out of the tent and stared in mute awe as three people arrived. An Elleth who could have been Arwen's twin and whose soul to their sight had a bright silver and gold gleam to it of such nature that their eyes ached at first to see it, to see beneath that veil. A man with one hand, tall and dark-haired, on his face traces of features that they had inherited, in the shape of the chin and in the shape of their eyes. And a vast thing that moved with-no, a person on four legs that moved with them, the size of a full-grown destrier, eyes seeming at first to blaze with the light of Aman.

Elladan looked to Elrohir. "So the dead are walking. Maybe that was Turin Turambar in the woods."

They looked to their packs. They would greet the newcomers, yes. And then maybe, if Luthien and Beren did not mind too much, they might ask Huan to accompany them. One did not idly beard even a benevolent scion of the Ainu in its lair, after all, without a guardian.


	9. Return of the Dead:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luthien and Beren adjust to a changed world. 
> 
> Elladan and Elrohir decide to go south. 
> 
> Morgoth Bauglir orders Thuringwethil to seek the Shadowland and to wait to see what manner of being could create darkness greater to his own.

**_The Refuge of Last Resort:_ **

Luthien looked around her, a sense of sorrow and weight clouding initial sight and Sight alike. This was in many ways the last, best hope of the Free peoples. Mirkwood cleansed of the Ungoliant-spawn that had infected it and remade into a realm that could contain a larger amount of people than more easily expected. Their arrival had seen them meet her cousin and her old friend, with whom she'd spoken soft words, and of all people to meet Olorin, of the people of the Star-Kindler, now clad in mortal flesh and going by the name Mithrandir. His words were quieter and bleak, but spoke of the reality. 

The old monster that they had fought and come near to slaying in one of their deeds had died, seemingly, for good when a battle had hewn him down and cut his Ring from his finger. For a time Evil had seemed stayed, and yet the Doors had slowly but abruptly begun to corrode, and something had seemed to hammer at them from within. The Valar had not known what to do, for it was in no vision of Mandos or Vaire that this would be so, and Eru had been silent. Then, thirty years ago, the corrosion and weakness had at last found its true root and something had erupted in a withered and howling laughter, storming his way from the doors to fall from the skies as a withered and cadaverous ruin of what he had been. His feet restored to him though his crown remained on his head, he had survived the impact and relished the devastation of planetfall.

Only thirty years in truth but from the time his bare feet had made contact the Sun had become swollen and red, Arien seeming to weaken and struck by a plague, perhaps of the devising of Morgoth, perhaps not. Time and space had become distorted, at fundamental levels, well beyond the return and the re-enfleshing of the dead. Children were born and aged more swiftly, Elves knew true aging (Celeborn, even, starting to grow a beard much too soon), and a lesser version of the first marring, in the days of the lamps as the effects rippled out into the material world.

Thirty years since newly revived armies beholden to their first master under the command of Thuringwethil had struck like a thief in the night, falling upon Rivendell which fell in fire and sword, most of the House of Elrond fleeing, only Arwen, her many-times descended granddaughter and lookalike lost and for a time assumed dead. She had asked about seeing Arwen, who of all her kin she wanted most to see but Galadriel had gone pale at first and then told her things that left her confused.

Part of her did not know how to feel if Galadriel's suspicions were correct but she was quite sure they could not be. Leaving aside that she knew the Elves believed (though her mother had bluntly told her it was a lie and to beware the house of Feanor, which at times had indulged in war's cruelties to prove it one beyond all doubt) that such atrocities removed the soul from the body, there was no Elf that could bear an Ainu's spawn and live to tell the tale. There had never been a union, either, where the mortal was the woman and not the man, so that meant that Galadriel had had a bad scare from Morgoth's phantoms.

And yet.....she felt a sense of a world grown old and starting to seem to unravel, and knew within the marrow of her bones that her return, and that of Beren, was one of the first and the grimmest proofs of it. To return from the realm where the souls of Men went meant that the world's time was running down, and that their return served a purpose. But what? What purpose?

She did not know. Part of her felt her power grown stronger than it was, and she knew though she did not know how she knew that as Ea's slow decay continued her power would grow still the greater. She felt it, felt the knowledge and the legacy of her mother in her veins, she saw and she Saw.

And yet....her eyes turned to a place where a Girdle had arisen much like her mother's. A Shadow-land that most mortals and the servants of Morgoth could not pierce through but she, daughter of one with far greater experience, not only saw it, but saw two wards that worked together. One was clearly Mithrandir's and reflected experience, another yoked to it crude augmentations of enormous strength. Within it she briefly glimpsed gardens that were almost lavish bits of farm-land and then a great hulking being with pale skin whose golden eyes turned and she realized _he saw her_ and then she saw the smile and her eyes widened as she broke the connection.

Something gnawed at her and she did not know what it was, at one level, or more precisely she knew exactly what it was and refused to admit it.

\---------

_**Angband:** _

A withered and cadaverous giant turned his orange gaze upon his servant, his sole trustworthy general of any real note left. The damned Balrog, the only one of his kind that had lived and obeyed his summons, had gone and gotten his damned fool self killed in a great battle with an incarnate Maia. The greatest of the living dragons defied his summons and had burned one of his armies to a crisp when it was ordered, reminding him that his own power had willed that the Dragons obeyed a stronger force. And as he was, now, the way he had been when Tulkas's sword had hewn from hm his feet, he lacked the strength to command his own creations.

So the vampire-queen, all that was left of what he had had and what he had been.

She had let his fattened slave escape, letting her fatten and regain strength (part of him wondered and more than wondered, given the pulses of energy and the strange mirror aspect to it from what was now the Shadowland if what his more lucid moments told him was true truly was? It could not be. Melkor might have been able to sire a child but a withered Morgoth could not). He had punished her, of course, because she had cost him his property.

He had had quite the wonderful conversation with Mairon, who appeared as he had when he had first....reshaped him, recruited him. Remade him. Given him new armor and something that made him splendid in the image and the likeness he had desired him to have. A Maia of tall and hulking shape, of Aule and his forge-masters. Red hair and eyes of brilliant gold, a sheen that he had fortunately overlayed with a better look after giving his soul.....new things. Mairon was his usual sardonic self, and his wisdom cut through the price of the Marring, and then it had faded and where Mairon had been there was nothing and he remembered how he had escaped from the Doors, and what he had lost.

Thuringwethil had seen him and must have seen him talking to empty space as if his departed servant was there and with a sudden motion his fist slammed into her and she hit the ground.

**_Go to the Shadowland. Wait there. Something, or someone, with the Power hides there. Find out who it is, and what it is. And if you find some trace of the Peredhil, bring her back to me. I would see her fatten that way again._ **

Before the light of his eyes all his little bat could do was nod and fly away, and he professed not to notice the speed and the haste in her flight.

He looked down and then was puzzled, at first. He had been thin enough that if he felt himself he could feel that which was akin to ribs in his kind with each element of the 'bone' visible. Now there was something returning there. Heft. Muscle and stout strength. He smiled, and he could feel his strength pulsing slightly greater than it had been. Yes, he should have done this sooner and his hour would come nigh again. Before the bat had tormented his slave by letting her fatten and know health. 

Now he would indeed see her fatten with something else, a son or a daughter, a scion that would see his visions fulfilled, and permit him an heir to which he could transfer the essence of his flesh and re-emerge not merely as something slightly stronger than he had been, but as the very image of the towering splendor of his first form.

Lust crawled along his face and he felt part of him know what it was for that part to know desire. All it would take is finding the half-breed, and letting her return.

He would even be kind enough to spare her the whipping if she merely but laid on her back again and allowed him to....

The drool that fell down his lips was followed by his seeing his old servants Gothmog and Lungorthin in their fuller form, blades strapped to their back. Their eyes were drawn to the drool with a look of faint scorn he vowed to strike them for when he finished the ramble.

His servants saw their master drooling and that portion of him standing in its unimpressive size and girth, and rambling once more to empty air. They averted their eyes. One did not live long in Angband by telling its master that he was lost to his own evil and to the madness that he had unleashed for others.


	10. Into the Woods:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elladan and Elrohir sneak off into the woods to try to find their sister. 
> 
> Huan decides to accompany the Elven pups. 
> 
> Hurin encounters a familiar presence and begins to talk to her.

**_The outskirts of the Shadowlands:_ **

The return of Beren and Luthien had not dampened the enthusiasm of Elladan and Elrohir to go into the Shadowland and to see what, if anything, would be found there. Both knew what they were hoping to find, both knew what they likewise were deeply afraid would find them. Yet after thirty years of their sister's disappearance, after all the long and bitter years of being the only ones to hope, and the still more bitter in some ways results of at least someone else finally, truly believing them....they had waited long enough. It didn't matter. If their sister was dead, they would note where her grave lay and find a means to let her know when they united after Mandos's halls were opened that people had cared and never stopped looking. 

If she lived, she had withstood a horror that nothing they had imagined could, and she was far, far stronger than they had ever truly imagined her to be. She might think otherwise, a voice they heard that sounded unimaginably deep and echoed on the wind cautioned them, but they were right to think that. They stood at the edge of the Shadowland, near the place that had once terrified them and once welcomed them. The voice that had echoed and spoke with what was and was not speech brought a sudden curious huffing sound and they turned startled.

Huan was beside them.

"Huan?"

The dog huffed again, leaning his head forward. In those eyes they saw an intelligence as keen as any child of Illuvatar's, and a determination to go with them. They did not know that Huan had quietly followed them, smelling on the pups an anxiety leavened with hope that left him concerned. His mind was keen though in his resurrected form, as far as he knew, speech was not his, not yet, nor in truth. They had moved with skill, these pups, he'd actually had to work to catch up to them while being stealthy. And now here they were, at the edge of a place that they saw when right at it, and yet from merely a league away did not exist at all.

There was something strange here, the low and echoing voice that moved with the wind and spoke to them at that level between waking and dreaming and voice and thought amplified it.

"Well," murmured Elrohir, "here goes nothing."

Into the woods they strode.

They did not see that a place hollowed out by earlier strife that gave Thuringwethil enough shadow to be awake, at points, during the day, held the vampire, who had seen two Elves, the sons of Elrond, no less, and a dog of immense nature who was all too dreadfully familiar (her fanged teeth gnashed at the memory of his own fangs against her). They had come up to the void of the Shadowland and then, to her immense surprise, it had welcomed them into its maw. There was something off about this place, and when darkness came, she would go to see just what the nature of that strangeness was.

\----------

Hurin seemed to be seated in the meditation that his mother had taught him, legs crossed, fingers curled into his thighs, focusing his presence without. He could 'see' things, he 'saw' Thuringwethil near the woods and had resisted the temptation to yield to the maelstroms that occasionally rose within him. After the dreams his mother had had of her there was a part of him that ached to do nothing less than let himself yield to the desire for mastery over that which harmed his mother, to barrel from the woods a towering giant of fire and fury with eyes that burned like suns and to end the life of his wretched kin, but that would not be and would never be.

To go that way truly would make him the son of the entity which had sired him and he would rather die a thousand deaths than to do that. He felt her, again, then. A presence soft and lovely, a girl who had like him grown too quickly and her gifts with it, and her abilities outstripped her power to control them more totally than his did.

 _Mae Govannon,_ he heard her voice.

**_Hello, little Joy._ **

He heard her soft and sweet laughter. _**You should be careful. You know I am.....a friend. Family, even. There are others who would not be.**_

_Mama says the same thing.  
_

**_Mamas are wise, little Joy. They know things we do not._ **

_I like you.  
_

She heard his deep chuckle, knew that her parents would find the laughter somewhat scary but she found it welcoming, a sign that he, whoever 'he' was truly did trust her. 

_**How are things, little Joy?** _

She began an excited rush of thought-speech he absorbed easily, and he listened with a contented smile on his face. His mother, sensing him talking to someone, an Elf-child by the way she felt, and a child with a strange kind of kinship in how she talked just stayed for a moment or two to make sure there was no deeper risk. Then, smiling at her son and the ease with which he made friends even if this was never likely to be true of her again, she slipped out. 

She saw Turin on patrol and gave him a cautious wave, and brushed Nienor's shoulder with an affectionate rub that caused the other woman to look up from placing dishes back in a cabinet and smiling at her.

\--------

For his own part, Turin used patrols these days to keep his skills honed. Enemies seldom came into the Shadowland, they had done so thrice in five years. Nothing was all-powerful or perfect, Hurin had told him once, when he seemed ten and his voice was every bit that of a man many times that age, with a vibrant element that gave it a charisma even he could not readily disregard. The subtler elements, the ones just beneath human hearing, meant that Hurin could literally list types of rocks or trees and he could hold an audience spellbound. His skills were sharp, sharper even. He appreciated that something had changed, his skills seemed more honed, capable of deciding with greater effectiveness where and when and how to strike. 

His perception was stronger too, and he appreciated the merits of being able to think. It was how he detected the sound of branches against fur and the clacking of claws, signs of a four-legged predator of no small bulk, as his hand went to his sword.

Then two Elves materialized out of the woods, and behind them a form shadowy and dark and immense, with glowing eyes.

"Elladan, Elrohir," he nodded affably. They had come by the woods twice and spoken to him twice.

"Turin," Elrohir spoke and he stiffened slightly.

"You would be surprised how readily people could accept that the dead walk nowadays, son of Hurin."

He smiled with a slight quirk of his lip.

"Perhaps."

"You seem....more content....than when we last saw you."

Turin nodded.

The shadowy figure with glowing eyes stepped closer and he almost dropped his sword in shock.

"Huan?"

He knew immediately who the hound was, it was impossible to forget, for he had also seen the statue of him by an Elven sculptor. It was not quite true to life, undersized and putting Huan's fur as much cleaner and less shaggy than it was, but it was him.

"I......see what you mean," he said cautiously.

The hound barked, with a joyous sound and before Turin could quite react the hound had barreled him over and was licking at his face.

\--------

**_I have to go for now , little Joy. Keep your mind safe._ **

_i will. Thank you, Hurin.  
_

His eyes widened, and then he felt motion return to his limbs. That was a dog's bark, and no mere hound. This.....he took a deep breath, clenching his fist and focused on the golden center that his mother had taught him, remembering the softness of her words. This was where he would have to gamble on his uncles being accepting or thinking with their sword-hilts.

\---------

Nienor heard the dog bark, too, and remained silent, still.

Her hand quietly slid to a dagger that she'd made, remembering the skills her mother and the Elves she'd stayed with with her mother had taught her. If worst came to worst....

\--------

Arwen too heard the dog bark, and fearful for Turin and yet anticipating something when she felt the two presences she'd cautiously reached out to, began to move with a sudden swiftness.

\-------

Elladan and Elrohir sensed her, too, and their eyes widened and they turned pale and then their eyes moistened slightly.

\-------

Huan moved off of Turin as an Ellyth strode out of the woods, hair now a mixture of white and black streaks. She was thirty years older than when they'd seen her, her proportions different in other ways, and they knew enough of that to understand that their grandmother had not warned them idly. A sense of compassion and sorrow flooded through them, leavened with a simple astonishment that anyone could have survived such a thing.

\-------

Arwen looked at her brothers, or the things that seemed to be her brothers.

She had her one true memory, and she hoped it was one that they shared.

"We all know the enemy has.....schemes. Things that can appear as what people would hope to see, but are not them. So.....please, just....tell me you remember this.

A day when two birds had spooked Figwit's horse, making him chase it, and were perched on a desk, laughing as birds laugh. Behind them there was a fox, a fox that had discovred she could become one, among....other things, I think. Maybe. She snuck up behind them, as they laughed, lost to that merriment."

Elladan and Elrohir understood immediately, and both answered in turn: "And then she snuck up behind those birds and gave us the biggest fright of our lives to that point."

Arwen turned pale, then, and an expression crossed her face reserved up until then for one person only.

"Ell-" she could not finish the words before the reality stunned her.

They looked to Turin, who by then had raised himself to his feet.

"I wouldn't-" but they couldn't quite stop themselves from rushing toward her, as the blend of warmth and hope that surged through her was leavened with fear.

Just as they got too close and she was backing herself up, poised to flee, a being leaped down from the trees in front of her, clad in a simple tunic and a pair of cloth breeches, his feet bare. He raised two large hands and the pale giant with the glowing golden eyes said:

_**Wait. She can't.......you need to give her time.** _

They froze, halting to a point that Elladan actually knocked Elrohir over due to neither quite being able to stop in time.

They both looked up.

"Who are you?"

_**I'm your nephew. Welcome to the Shadowland.** _


	11. Kin in the Shadowland:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brothers and sisters meet in the woods. 
> 
> A warning is given and heeded.

_**The Shadowland, before the Cabin:** _

Elladan and Elrohir were stuck staring in speechless bemusement at the giant that had leaped down from a tree with a simian grace and yet stood before them with a pallor and dignity and majesty that they had never before seen. It was akin to the nature of what flowed within their veins, the blood of the Ainur, of the lineage and the house of Melian. And yet there was other blood there, something dark and old and strong, yet reawakened in a glimpse of what could have been. The being that stood between them and their sister had her ears, the curves of her lips, and other traits that showed that kinship. His face had elements of their father too, including a surprising weariness and age that was far too old for one that seemed so young.

Yet the shagginess of that dark hair and the golden hue to eyes that burned with a light that seemed suddenly familiar in a way that led the twins to raise themselves to their feet made something else clear to them.

"You're protecting our sister from us?"

Elrohir had expected the question to come out with a snap and had prepared himself to wince but instead it was simple confusion.

"You, the son of Morgoth, protecting our sister at all?"

He nodded.

"Why?"

He looked to his mother and they heard an Osanwe communication that floored them with the slight glimpse of strength unfettered for a moment. Their sister calmed herself, as he turned to them, moving his hands closer to his size and straightening himself up to the fullness of his height and bulk. 

_**Because I am Hurin Arwenion, and that is the only family that matters to me.** _

The voice was strange, it had a deep resonance as if it were not one voice that spoke but many. To their further surprise the towering height and bulk seemed to shrink, somehow, and he 'merely' became something that was still further confusing to them. A bleached Feanorian, whose first concern was their sister, to whom he turned and put his arm around, leading her to them. Arwen was still nervous, and in that recognition and the understanding of the truths they had seen, the initial wariness and hostility they felt faded merely to wariness, their hands moved from their sword.

It was little things, how calm their sister was next to him, how much he focused not on keeping them apart but bringing them together, the ways those glowing eyes focused on her and on Turin and Nienor....and the very reality that one who had lived with Turin Turambar, bane of Morgoth, for five years was still alive to tell the tale.

 _ **Mother....**_ he said with a soft sigh, and a brief pause. _ **She has been through bad things. It is not easy for her to welcome new company, still less so when as far as she knew she and I were the last of the house of Elrond.** _

They froze. "You know of our father?"

 ** _I do, yes. I've seen him in her memories._ **The sorrow in his eyes remained though he smiled, slightly, a gesture achingly akin to their grandfather.

He led Arwen to sit by a fire-pit and then with a casual flick of his wrists the fire ignited, as Elladan and Elrohir stared.

Then what he said dawned on them. "As far as she knew, she was....the last?"

He nodded _ **. That is why she stares at you and can't bring herself to say all she wishes to say. She has been haunted by a nightmare of the fall of Rivendell that is not true, nor close to it.** _

Their eyes followed and they saw her staring at them, as if her eyes were memorizing each and every detail of their face and where and how they were clad, as Turin shrugged and decided to join them. The cabin's front door opened and Nienor stared in surprise, her hand slipping from her side as she cautiously padded over. Huan, for his own part, padded over to Arwen and laid his head on her lap, and Arwen stared at him in confusion and then gave him a soft smile, her hand moving along his head.

Yet her eyes returned to them and her mouth opened, repeatedly, as if she wanted to speak, but she didn't know what to say, or how to say it.

Elrohir knew what he wished to say, and how awkward it would be to say it, yet here, like this, in front of the Men and even his....nephew, who though he couldn't be older than fifteen years seemed a man and a very tall and well-built man at that...it would be cheap, perhaps destroy a hope that had come reality on a scale none of them had dared to imagine could be so.

A silence fell, awkward but not uncomfortable, Arwen's gaze continuing to look at her family with a mute amazement, her eyes moist with the amazement that her brothers truly were alive, truly were here. _If Morgoth had lied about this....._ she heard a voice, soft, still, and small that echoed within her soul. Elladan and Elrohir felt that presence and looked in confusion, while Hurin smiled with a slightly smug grin that was mostly relief. _What else might he have lied about?_

Nearly a quarter-hour lapsed before Arwen at last worked up the courage to speak. "You know who my son's father is." They nodded. "I am sorry that I.....shamed, and disgraced our family that way." 

Her gaze sunk to the floor, as her body trembled. "I....I must have tempted him, somehow. What he wanted from me was because of things I did or did not do. I don't regret that my son is who he has become but he's the only good thing I've given to the world. I understand, if after seeing him, and after seeing me, you'd want nothing to do with me."

Then she fell silent as their eyes looked much more closely at the black and white stripes in her hair. It was a striking difference to the younger sister they knew-Hurin's eyebrow rose for a moment and then he made a slight gesture akin to an amused snort, followed by a relieved one-but it did not detract from who she was and what she was, it only added to it.

The silence that followed became much more tense in its own way, Arwen's trembling intensifying slightly as the twins looked at each other. For a time they wished their grandmother or someone older than them, someone who had seen and endured and survived things directly was there. Someone who had less of a habit of impulsiveness, of making foolish decisions when wisdom was called for. What words were there for this? They looked to each other, talking quietly, and Hurin for his own part remained where he was, seeming to talk to Turin and Nienor, who had learned of the art, though not near skilled as even the least of the Eldar were with it.

"You're our family," they both spoke, finally, at the same time. "You will always be. We will always love you, no matter what happened, nor how it happened. The only one to blame for this is the monster in the north." There were other things that needed to be spoken but they could not bring themselves to say them, not then. Arwen cocked her head and then shook at a different level, hugging herself as tears fell down her face. The emotions coursing through her were powerful and they could feel the shadows deepening as Hurin sought to give his mother room to let them be and to still keep this place safe and the wards of Mithrandir strong.

Of all of them, the emotions most prevalent were a deep shame and self-loathing and a sense of warmth and love that had been dormant for a long time, each warring with the other and neither quite managing to prevail. Arwen wiped her eyes and then looked to them. She whispered two words, softly, yet they echoed like thunder, then three more.

"Thank you. I.......love you."

They felt the impulse to rush to her and to try to hug her but their nephew's gaze met theirs in a searching fashion and with a subtle jerk of his head they clenched their fists and restrained themselves.

Only Huan felt and seemed fully comfortable, the Hound of Valinor content with the feeling of Arwen's scritching.

There were more questions that Elladan and Elrohir ached to have answered, not of what precisely happened with Arwen when she was captive but things that had bothered them. Arwen had vanished from Rivendell during its fall, and during the only foolhardy venture and bid to reclaim it, in her room there was dust, and what seemed to be Elven footprints followed by those of an enormous hound, and the Evenstar fallen from her neck. Had Arwen endured the full span of Morgoth's return a captive, or had she managed to escape? What manner of being was this giant with the golden eyes that was their new kinsman, unlooked for and possessing a strength to overturn the world yet content to light fires and to be his mother's voice when she was too caught in her fears to speak?

All of that could wait. Their sister lived, and judging by everything around them, she had endured horrors that would have broken and slain many lesser beings. Looking at her and the realization that there were as many unspoken questions within her as there were with them, it finally dawned on them as well that they knew who their sister had been, a long time ago, when Rivendell was the Last Homely House and a place of wonder and story and song. Of contemplation and of lore, the memory of the Dawn-Age preserved undiminished. They did not know so well who she had become, and in this sense, it offered them a chance rare in life. To get to know someone else, to know them, and to try, cautiously and uncertainly to broach the idea of becoming family again.

Quietly, through the time that followed around the fire, eyes illuminated slightly by its gaze, the initial awkwardness faded into something of a mixture of uncertainty and quiet hope. Their sister lived, that was enough for now.


	12. 'I Bring Arafel, the Cloud-Darkness at the End of the Universe.'

**_The House of Last Resort:_ **

Mithrandir seemed an old Man to the eyes of those who looked at him, clad in grey robes with a tall pointed blue hat. Yet this was a superficial glimpse at best and any who were closer to him would have felt traces of the West that was forgotten in his gaze, in its keenness and in its depth, and in its understanding. Mithrandir remembered well what had happened when he and his other four colleagues had made landfall. Allatar and Pallando had gone to the east once more, their countenances shining more brightly for the bonds on their gifts were looser. Against the servant it would have been one thing, against the master it was a different matter entirely.

Curunir, brave, foolish Curunir, had raised a great army following the sacking of Rivendell and orchestrated a great battle. He had slain the only Balrog to answer the summons of Morgoth, if not the last left, in a direct confrontation but then he had died and he had not returned, the wind from the West cold. And Aiwendil, his task was hardest of them all. As the bonds holding Ea itself tottered his was a task to preserve the creations of Kementari amidst the bloody and savage elements of a new war. Aiwendil was strong and his knowledge of beast and plants was deep. He trusted that his task, at least, was certain though the lack of knowledge about the Blue Wizards bothered him.

For years Turambar, his sister, poor tormented Arwen Elrondiel, and her son, her strange and improbable son who defied everything he had thought he knew about the universe as much as Morgoth erupting from the Doors of Night and bringing Arda to the brink of doom much sooner than he had understood to be so under the designs of Illuvatar, had dwelt in safety in the woods. His wards were there, and in his youth the child had intensified them to a degree that left him awed, would have even if he were Olorin, of the people of the Star-Kindler, disciple of the Weeper, unbound and freed.

The augmentations were crude things, the product of a child of great power without much in the way of training, and they had given them peace, safety. Chances to grow and heal in ways that exceeded anything he had dared to hope. The child's growth had seen a subtle improvement in the nature of those wards, that which was friendly could see within, that which was hostile or feared to be hostile would encounter nothingness where there was something. The mind would rebel at such a sight, and even the dreadful servants of the Great Enemy in what he felt to be a more than suitable irony could not perceive things. Somehow, the combination of wards worked as a factor to repel them. Even something that had given him an initial moment of true fear, the flyover of the monster Smaug, had seen the dragon halt over the woods, and then fly further from it, almost as if some great lurking fear had become animate.

He had heard and he had seen only one such being in his time in Valinor or the Great Lands before this: the returned Luthien Tinuviel, and she was a child of a Maia of Este. This one had the undiminished power of the old Melkor, and he could sense that and that this child did not hide this. He could access the gifts and spheres of all the Valar, and yet of them from what he had seen, it was the gifts of Kementari and the Feanturi used almost overwhelmingly, and a subtle twist on the ways of the Elder King that brought a communication invisible and unbound that nothing could restrain. A Palantir on a greater scale.

He was there the day that Melkor had descended from the sky in power and in majesty greater than any other of the Valar, that vast and colossal gaudy form that had been an insult and a blight to their maker's will and to his creation. He had seen Melkor flaunting that he shared in all those gifts and wielding them in corrupted and fell fashions, yet the son did things like ensuring none went hungry, that there was cloth for weaving, and shielding those who suffered grievously from the more fell creations where the realms of Morgoth and Lorien met from that juncture.

Galadriel knew, though she knew what her senses, keen as they were and honed by Melian told her. He knew more, he had seen into the heart and the nature of Hurin Arwenion, and he had no fear of this boy.

Wind pulsed and in it he heard a voice, and he stepped out into the edge of the camp, carried there by the wind, letting himself see the coastline.

The waters seemed to tremble and then a great being arose, clad in a form of his own thought. He was deep blue, the mail that shone from him illuminated by the Sun even in its reddish state and his majesty undiminished. He was gigantic, a great trident in his right hand and his eyes gleaming with an eldritch light.

Gandalf felt the instinctual pull of Maia to Vala (and he wondered, in retrospect, just what would happen if he did meet this Hurin Arwenion. Would the son of a Vala, even the Fallen, have the power to command Maia to obedience?) and knelt.

Ulmo looked at him, his power and splendor a wonder, as always to behold. His voice echoed with the depths of the great oceans and the waters of which he was lord and master, and Olorin listened keenly.

He nodded. "Eru's will be done."

Ulmo nodded in turn. **_On Arda as it is in Heaven._**

Ulmo stepped back into the oceanic abyss from whence he had risen and the winds carried him back, as Gandalf mused. He would have a very great deal to do and little time in which to do it. And first, there was taking what was for him a gamble he had feared to take, in truth, for reasons completely different to most. 

A child of mortal blood with the capacity to claim the fealty of Maiar was not something to dismiss lightly.

And yet it was the will of Eru that he should speak to him to give him a warning. Even his powers were not infinite, and there would come a time when his mother and he and the children of Hurin would have to flee the Shadowland. Monsters waited without, and no safety in the Great Lands could or would endure forever. It was dawn, now. He would wait until high noon when the child would be stepping more deeply into the woods to speak to him.


	13. Nothing New under the Sun:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As his mother and his family continue to try to broach the awkward boundaries of time and change, Hurin goes walking at noon to his meditation spot. There he finds a visitor.

_**The Cabin in the Woods:** _

After those first words, Elladan and Elrohir had adjusted more easily, in the end, to elements of what their sister needed. It chafed at them and it felt wrong, cruel, even. After all the long years of searching and thirty years' absence to find her with her body changed and her mind moreso. She could speak to and interact with the living legends that sat next to them, as if they were closer kin than they. That too rankled, but the way she reacted to any sudden movements from them gave them at least some understanding, if not always the patience or the fullness of restraint to use it.

Turin and Nienor had found her in the woods and taken her and given her shelter. She had a home and a place to live with them. In any and all ways that counted, they were kin as closely joined as she and they were. It was a strange thought but no stranger than the withered giant that had shrieked in triumph and descended from the skies, nor the sudden and terrible onslaught that had drowned Rivendell in fire and fury and the fell power of the sword. The giant disturbed them at some level, but he also was someone welcome to them and they were still uncertain which emotions would end up prevailing. They could sense great power from him, an echo of so many things that they didn't know, at some levels, exactly what they saw.

And their sister had somehow given birth to this.....being...and raised him. It was impossible and yet it was reality, and all they could do was have small talk about the ways the crops here were good, dancing on the edges of what they wanted to say.

The giant, who they could not yet see as their nephew, got up later in the next day, after they had slept sound sleep.

Elladan and Elrohir felt ashamed to admit it but they had more than a few nightmares of Rivendell's fall and the ruined and twisted vampire-thing far more terrifying in the truth than in the legends. Vampires in the stories of the First Age were gigantic bats that drank blood. This thing was no bat, it was far too humanlike and the ways it moved were....wrong. And hate, such utter hate in those eyes and self-loathing. And then that night they had dreamed of the old Rivendell when the world was happy and content and darkness fall in the Dagorlad and evil held gone forever.

They saw a shining golden light in the dreams, neither sun nor moon nor stars and in the wake of that light there was peace and rest.

They slept long and late, for true rest came seldom in the House of Last Resort where monsters lurked in shadows and doom moved ever closer as the ailing Arien and now an equally ailing Tilion began to cast a reddish hue at night.

\--------

His family was up and talking, still dancing around the edges of things. Some bitter part of him wondered if it was because of him that they were like this, or if it was another limit of his powers? He was hoping for the latter, but he was never quite certain. He had made a breakfast for them, and eaten a humble meal for himself and slipped out as he heard his mother talking to his uncles. He had thought them the younger brothers but they were older, and that recognition that his sight was not perfect, nor able to see all things for eternity. It was not something he ever told his mother, whose power was akin to that of Melian, if a somewhat lesser thing through several generations of mortal might.

He knew all the things he could do, for bad and for good, and he preferred to find what he could not, for in those things he was reminded that his was not a role to be master of his own creation, but to help repair some of the ravages of...it....in the north.

He was walking to his meditation spot when he felt a flare of power. At first he steeled himself to protect his family, but then he felt that power more closely, and so he moved with caution and stealth. The being who had built the protections here had not said or done anything to him when he had made his changes, but he was a true Ainu, even in mortal form. He might resent a half-breed, especially one with the sire that he in all probability knew the truth thereof. He wielded a power that was Melian's gift to him and veiled himself in a much more complete darkness while seeing through it as clearly as if it were the brightest noon possible.

\--------

He saw a Man, or what seemed to be a Man, but the Man was of the people of the Star-Kindler, yet his nature and his skills were honed by service to the Weeper. His eyes were old and full of wisdom and understanding, and he was just standing there, taking a deep breath, feeling the man's marveling at just what he'd seen. The man took that time and then his eyes turned straight to the darkness, and in a strange voice he began to speak.

\--------

Olorin had not known what he would see or know in the Shadowland when he had followed Ulmo's orders to go here. The child had made his wards stronger, if in a crude fashion that only made sense, for Arwen Elrondiel had taught him much but no family of mortal origin would know how to wield and shape what the child knew. It felt peaceful here, the power of the Shadowland veiling it from the sight of the enemy, and there was air here clean of any of the emotional impact of despair or the ruin and burning of war. The child might be the biological son of Melkor but he was no thing of Morgoth. The peace here showed him that and part of Olorin's worries faded, though the rest did not.

Luthien had been powerful but she was a child of a Maia, and Maiar were, save those ruined and twisted by Morgoth's foul magics, incapable of truly calling upon others for obedience. This one.....

He saw the darkness that veiled the boy and then let himself gamble on trusting the words of Ulmo, and from him, he hoped, truly those of Eru and not one of Ulmo's decisions to act as Ulmo would, the council be damned.

"It is too lovely a noon for you to be hiding in shadows, Hurin Arwendion." 

The shadows seemed to slip away and he saw a boy, and he was a boy, only five years in truth though with the build of someone older and knowledge far older than this. He was pale, though he saw traces of Elrond in the face, and the manner of the Peredhils in him. Deeply pleased at one level that was and was not obscure, he heard the boy speak and heard the authoritative tones of a Vala:

_**You're the one who set the wards here, aren't you?** _

He nodded, and then Olorin felt his eyebrows raise. The child's voice had that Vala-tone but he did not seek to command Olorin as Valar could Maiar, one of the simplest and most ruinous powers the Great Enemy had twisted. 

He was startled when the boy seemed to fly toward him and then hugged him, telling him:

_**Thank you. You kept my family safe.** _

That gave him the last reassurance he needed, and the only one he needed.

"You have done well, young Arwenion, but I am afraid your time in this sanctuary is about to end. The Great Enemy cannot see it, but he knows that there is a thing he cannot see. Soon, he shall try an act of malice to threaten another, and this...."

He sighed.

"An old enemy of your family lurks waiting. She wants your mother back."

Hurin stiffened.

_**Aunt Athaewen.** _

Olorin visibly jolted for a moment and his hat slipped off his head and he caught it, fumblingly.

"Yes, her. How do you know that name?"

The boy's smile was sad and knowing, an expression too mature for such a young face.

_**Like the thing in the north, I have....gifts. and sight. I know the names of souls and their deeds as the Weaver and the Lord of the Halls do. If I could abandon such sight, I would. To have that burden until the end of all things....** _

He shook his head.

_**That doesn't matter. She's outside here, waiting?** _

Olorin nodded. "Your mother doesn't want to leave, but you will have to convince her, and within a few days. You have given her years, much more than I expected she could have. Now she, and your family will have to come to the House of Last Resort."

Hurin grimaced.

_**Well, it doesn't matter what happens to me. She deserved better from this world. A husband and a kingdom and a family that would endure long after the stars went out, her legacy to a world that offered so little. That will never happen, and she has me.** _

Such a mature and bitter laugh, with a tone that made Olorin flinch but then he would get _something_ from the father, and if a laugh was all that was there, then that was manageable.

**_I will do my best._ **

Olorin gently moved his hand and the boy nodded, and he put it on his shoulder. "You have done much more with much less than any have had a right to expect. For whatever it means to you when you arrive, you shall have my aid. Let them see what I see, and they will see you as you truthfully see yourself. The son of Arwen, who shows a thing..." 

A shadow passed over his face and there was a look of deep sorrow for a moment "that could have been."

Hurin nodded, as he absorbed the words. 

**_I think that's what Uncle Manwe wants with me. Someone like the brother he wanted to have but what it denied him having._ **

He sighed.

_**I can protect myself and more than, if I need. My mother needs more than I do. If there are people you can give enough of the truth to help her, that's all that I ask.** _

Gandalf nodded, his earlier worries vanished and replaced with a relief too profound for words.

"I shall do my best in turn." He vanished as if he had never been, and Hurin smiled, for a moment, a genuine smile. One of the wisest of the Maiar, at least, did not think he was a monster.

 ** _Other than my family that makes one. Hah._** Then he strode back to the cabin, where he listened to his uncles telling an old story from Rivendell of how they'd once had another idea of how to prank Glorfindel, His mother laughed, a soft and clear sound, not the louder peals she'd made when she was younger, and part of him felt relief. It was a shame that just when she had learned that some of her kin lived that a place they had all felt safe in would be swept away like snow before the summer sun.

His hand rested on one of the logs quietly.

That was always the way of the world, in the end. He slipped in quietly, sitting near his mother and seeing how easily she adjusted to having Huan as a companion, hearing Huan's friendly huff at his return.


End file.
